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As previously mentioned on KLOF, due to Linda Thompson’s spasmodic dysphonia, a rare vocal condition, for her latest album, Proxy Music, her songs, as the witty title suggests (with its accompanying pastiche of the first Roxy Music album cover) have been brought to life by an array of friends and family with her son Teddy co-producing as well as contributing.
Daughter Kami Thompson steps up to the mark first with The Solitary Traveller, her husband James Walbourne as co-writer, and on acoustic guitar, bass, and fairground-like keyboards, she sings lead with Teddy, harmonising. Set to an old time waltzing melody; it has a traditional feel to the lyrics of loss (“I had a voice clear and true/I chided and scolded and lied about you/Never held my wicked tongue/And now that voice is gone/I had a son looked like you/He did my bidding and paid me my due/Slaved away morning and night/But he ran away and he’s gone… I once had a man love me well/I drew him to me and cast my spell/I was disdainful, he’s sick and so painful/And now that man is gone”) but, for all the self-wrought abandonings, it turns out to be a celebration of being a woman on her own (“Lonely life, there’s no such thing…I’m alone now, you think I’d be sad/No voice, no son, no man to be had/You’re wrong as can be boys, I’m solvent and free boys/All my troubles are gone”).
Co-written with Charlie Dore, Or Nothing At All was the album’s genesis, with Linda telling Teddy she could hear Martha Wainwright singing it. And so she does, accompanied by Daniel Mintseris on piano, a bitterly sad lament relating to loss (“The product of true lovers’ sighs/The apple of my jaundiced eye/I dared to hope you’d be/A hundred men in their white coats/Would check you with their stethoscopes/And hand you straight to me/I’d come to call at your behest/Say comb your hair, put on your vest”).
Co-written by Teddy (who completed the lyrics on the train to Edinburgh), the slow tempo Bonnie Lass, sung by The Proclaimers with Rob Burger on pump organ and mournful fiddle from Aly Bain, is, as the title suggests, of a traditional Scottish folk ballad persuasion, another song of loss (“In a cold, dark grey/In a dream of yesterday/I see the darling wean/I long to hold again”).
In contrast, arranged for piano, double bass and clarinets, the romantically spry Darling This Will Never Do has Rufus Wainwright in Cole Porter/George Gershwin cabaret mode (“ I thought my poor heart was on the blink/Now it’s cartwheeling into the pink/And I’m doing that old soft shoe/Darling this will never do…What of the future my old friends say/What if love goes bad?/But this September come what may/Believes in this beautiful dream”), even throwing in a few lines in French.
One of several highlights, sung by Ren Harvieu with Richard Thompson on electric and acoustic guitars and harmonium, I Used To Be So Pretty is a poignant folksy number about the toll of ageing (“I used to be so pretty/But now you wouldn’t know me/You’d walk by me If you passed me on the street/I’m ten miles from the city/The fare is too much for me/And the walk home is going to hurt my feet… I’ve a mailbox full of bills/And a mouth full of pills”) that could have come from the former duo’s early albums, the refrain “Pretty is as pretty does/But when you have it, it’s enough/When it’s gone/You need fortitude, not pity/Oh I wish I was/I wish I was still pretty” as wonderfully stained with ache and regret as I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight.
Based on a real-life friendship (“We had tea at Bertaux/We like cake and it shows/A moment on the lips/A lifetime on the hips…We’re a funny pair/He likes coasters, I don’t care”), John Grant is not only co-written by him with Linda and Teddy but, recorded in Reykjavik, Grant also sings it and plays the piano, giving a bizarre meta feel to a song about himself (“he was absent on the night his mother died/Where was he, I don’t know/But I do know he was there, really/And she knew it/But he didn’t, not at all/I hear that he’s moved on to the fjords/Or Lake Woebegone/Trying to find a place in which he can belong”).
Featuring just acoustic guitar and pump organ, the only track on which, joined by her son Teddy, Linda sings harmonies, Kami returns alongside James, who co-wrote as The Rails for the trad folk sounding Mudlark and its scavengers’ lament for a life of hard graft (“I’m an old man and I work in the sand/I’m an old man, I live from mouth to hand/There’s sadder sights to see/Along the Thames than me”).
Backed by Nicholas Falk on banjo with a fiddle solo from David Mansfield, Dori Freeman (who Teddy’s also produced) is the featured voice on the sparse bluegrassy waltzing Shores of America which shares the earlier idea of a woman whose man has left defiantly making her own way in the world (“Are you helpless with laughter/As you picture my life/I’m nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother/And nobody’s wife/But I have my own name/And what do you have but your shame/You’ll see me no more/I’m bound for the shores of America”) with the witty kiss-off “And if it’s true/That only the good die young/Lucky old you/‘Cause you’ll be around until kingdom come”.
Opening with her fiddle solo, co-writer Eliza Carthy is joined by James Walbourne on acoustic guitar and Ben Seal on backing vocals for the energetic That’s The Way The Polka Goes, something of a nonsense song number which touches on mortality (“We’re all fools and we must die”), singing and dancing (“I have a bonnet trimmed with blue/Do I wear it? Yes I do/Always wear it when I can/Going to the ball with my young man”) and unrequited passions (“My brother John says he will cry/If he can’t get the girl with the bonny brown eye”) and as such has all the makings of some Irish or Scottish fling complete with Ewan Wardrop’s stepping and his and her body percussion along with a “Bibbity, babbity, bee-baw babbity” refrain.
Recruiting Richard Thompson to help complete Three Shaky Ships, accompanied by Adrian McNally on keys and Chris Price on guitars, The Unthanks afford it a suitably dark and moody English folk ballad treatment and its words of wisdom to the narrator’s children about matters of l’amour (“Perfection is a thankless task/What you need is there/You just have to let love scare you, when you love so blind/Shake you and tear you and cloud your mind… Give promises and kisses, but not your heart away”), signing off with the repeated line “Stay close, give thanks/Open hearts, close ranks”.
It ends with co-writer Teddy on vocals, Zak Hobbs on guitars and mandolin and the combined chorus voices of Freeman, Grant, Hobbs, Susan McKeown, The Proclaimers, his father and Rufus Wainwright for a doff of the cap to the bastions of contemporary folk dynasties with the folk-Americana swayalong Those Damn Roches which salutes them, the Wainwrights, McGarrigles, Watersons, Carthys, Coppers, and, of course, the Thompsons (and a wry admission that his clan “Can’t get along ‘cept when we’re apart”), that calls for a raise-the-rafters crowd singalong with a refrain that pretty much summarises the whole album “Bound together in blood and song, who can break us?/When we are singing loud and strong, who can take us?” I hear no arguments to the contrary.
Buy or Stream Proxy Music
US & Canada https://ffm.to/proxymusic
UK & EU: https://storysoundllc.lnk.to/ProxyMusic | Norman Records | Rough Trade
