The Comedy of Errors: Storyville - From Where I Stand (9 May 1992)

Buy this on Discogs

When I link to these posts on Twitter - handle is @greasepaintpeel - I put in some pithy subtitle to avoid the links looking too po-faced.  In this case the subtitle will be “When Discogs goes wrong”, because in trying to get this track up I found myself questioning my sanity thanks to a rare piece of fallibility from a site that has been invaluable over the years of writing this blog.

My notes for From Where I Stand warn me that it “may end up being too vanilla ultimately (to make the cut for the blog)”.  Many months after first hearing the file of the 9/5/92 show, I certainly couldn’t place it when I called up YouTube to see if it was available for sharing.  The beefy jangled guitars have Storyville sounding somewhere between Big Country and Teenage Fanclub.  Lyrically, From Where I Stand picks up on the angel lover admiration complex of Spirtualized’s Angel Sigh, but whereas Jason Pierce was content merely to observe the glory of the object of his affections, Storyville’s singer (either Barry Morris or Darren Pearse) is intending to make his interest known and has no fear of either her beauty or her “holiness”.  It’s a straight MOR love song - not earth-shaking or game changing - but I’ve listened to it and enjoyed it numerous times over the last three days.  I could picture it making it on to the 1992 Radio One daytime playlist, though the authorities might have blanched at the final line’s reference to a “hard on day”.  The fact it didn’t make the daytime list means it sits in that odd branch of records on a John Peel running order - the ones that are making a play for mainstream acceptance despite not quite having the money to pull it off.  The type of record that I’ve kept rejecting from this blog whenever Peel played something by The Skin and Hair Trading Company.

So with From Where I Stand accepted with open arms, I took myself off to Discogs to get a little more background information on Storyville from their page, which opens by explaining they come from Austin, Texas.  “Wow!” I think, “”For a Texan, the singer kept the drawl nice and light”. So they released four singles on a small label called Nursery before releasing albums on EastWest and after a 5 year gap on Atlantic, so having swung for the mainstream they certainly seemed to have caught the ears of some influential people.  “Good for them” I thought and then went to the Wikipedia page.  And it was here that I suddenly became aware of the Storyville mystery.  In the Years Active section of Storyville’s Wikipedia page, it said 1994-2000.   Further searches on the Internet turned up the same information.  It turned out that the band who had recorded albums for those big American labels were a blues-rock band featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section.  And then I noticed that the recording of From Where I Stand I’m sharing here was a video and none of the men in that looked anything like the Texan Storyville.  So who the hell was playing as Storyville in 1992?  That was information which the Internet was much more reticent about providing.  Indeed, it was only the sleeve notes to the 12-inch release that gave me a band listing and confirmation that they had recorded the track at Cabin Studios in Coventry.

Discogs had mixed the two Storyvilles together.  From Where I Stand was the final release by the UK version of Storyville who had released exclusively through Nursery, an East Midlands based label who put out an early release by Catatonia and, of greater interest to me, tracks by Thieves featuring David McAlmont.  I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the Austin guys heard an import copy of From Where I Stand and decided “Nice name, we’ll take it!”  To their credit, they made the Leicester branch proud with recordings like Nice Ain’t Got Me Nothing.



Videos courtesy of David Holmes and parkboy55.