Enjoy Life

Summer CDs

If you're not sure what to add to your playlist, we have some fantastic suggestions for you.

One Hand Clapping

Paul McCartney and Wings (Capitol)

Recorded during the summer of 1974, on the back of the success of Band On The Run, this album was originally intended as a Let It Be-like film and LP of Wings performing live in the studio. Both were quickly shelved but tracks from the sessions have dribbled out over the years on bootlegs and more recent official deluxe editions.

Although still incomplete this excellent double CD features most of the tracks from the project and provides a fascinating snapshot of McCartney as he evolved throughout the early and mid-Seventies, a period in which he came up with some of his most enduring solo songs. So, featured in pleasingly informal versions, are such greats as Maybe I’m Amazed, My Love, Hi Hi Hi, Live and Let Die and Jet as well as classic Beatles tracks Let It Be, Long and Winding Road and Lady Madonna.

Arguably McCartney, with or without Wings, never quite hit these heights again in his solo career so this is a valuable, and long overdue, addition to his official catalogue.

Focus 12

Focus (Spirit of Unicorn)

This is the 12th studio album from the great Dutch progressive rock band that made such an impact in the early Seventies with their hit singles Sylvia and Hocus Pocus. Focus split in the late Seventies but, after a couple of ad-hoc reunions, were reunited permanently in 2001 when founder member Thijs Van Leer joined what had been up to that point effectively a Focus tribute band.

And it is the many talents of Van Leer, not just as flautist, keyboardist and yodeller extraordinaire, but also as a composer steeped in the European classical tradition, that continues to give the band its unique identity.

Even when virtuoso guitarist Jan Akkerman was in the band during its golden Seventies period it was Van Leer who gave Focus a uniquely European musical sensibility that was very different to the prevailing blues-based rock sound of the time.

Typical of this approach on the new album is Focus 13, the latest in a series of compositions of that name stretching back to the band’s first album, In and Out of Focus. As with its predecessors the Van Leer-composed track has a languid, expansive quality, and, in similar vein, Van Leer’s Bela, Born To Be You and Nura, with their distinctive mix of jazz, rock and classical influences, could only be Focus tracks.

This is no Moving Waves or Focus 3, which remain the gold standard for Focus albums, but there’s still much to enjoy here.

Linda Thompson

Proxy Music (StorySound Records)

She may have lost her voice, but Linda Thompson has certainly kept her sense of humour, as the cover for this excellent new album of her songs fully demonstrates. It finds Linda, at the age of 76, posing vamp-like in an imitation of the sleeve of Roxy Music’s first album. And who can’t resist a good pun?

There, however, the similarity with the arch early-Seventies pop experimentalists ends; this is an album of many moods and musical settings showcasing Linda’s late career as a songwriter. And since she can no longer sing because of a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia, Linda has recruited members of her extended family as well as close friends John Grant, The Proclaimers, Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Eliza Carthy to help out.

That Linda can call on such a distinguished cast of musicians is in part down to the remarkable series of albums she put out with then-husband Richard Thompson in the Seventies and Eighties, bookended by the 1974 I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight and 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights (1982), the latter ranking alongside Blood On The Tracks and Still Crazy After All These Years as stark portraits of marriages falling apart at the seams.

Thankfully the relationship with Richard has been long repaired and indeed the Thompson family now rivals the Roches and Wainwrights in the folk dynasty stakes, something acknowledged on the album’s closing song Those Damn Roches.

Given the intensely personal nature of songs like I Used To be Pretty Once and striking opening track Solitary Traveller, it’s no surprise that Linda should call on those who know her best to deliver them. Daughter Kami contributes vocals to Solitary Traveller, and son Teddy (who also co-produced the album) takes lead vocals on Those Damn Roches, while ex-hubbie Richard plays guitar and harmonium on I used To be Pretty Once.

It’s an extraordinary album in so many ways, not just in the quality of the songs and heartfelt performances, but also for the simple fact that one of folk-rock’s great vocalists, who has for so long had to remain in the shadows, is now, finally, getting the kind of recognition in her own right she has long deserved – and without singing a note. I’m sure the irony is not lost on Linda.

David Carroll and Friends

Bold Reynold Too (Talking Elephant)

There’s something pleasingly retro about this excellent album featuring folk stalwart David Carroll, evoking a time when musical genres were thrown in the air and then put back together in fascinating new patterns by the likes of Fairport Convention and Gryphon.

It is no surprise then to learn that members of both of those bands make up an important component of the ‘friends’ who have contributed to the arrangements and instrumentation of the 12 songs on this album, the follow-up to Carroll’s excellent debut Bold Reynold.

Like its predecessor Bold Reynold Too mostly delves into the darker end of the trad arr catalogue, albeit, as with opening track The Battle of Sowerby Bridge, Sheath and Knife and folk standard Down Among The Dead Men, often dressed up in a deceptively sprightly guise. In lighter vein is A Little of One With T’Other and Pace Egging Song while A Week Before Easter and Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy are songs of loss and separation, the latter a lovely close-harmony rendering.

The band includes Fairport’s Dave Pegg and Chris Leslie and Gryphon’s Graeme Taylor, Dave Oberle and Brian Gulland, the latter’s array of crumhorns, bassoons and recorders providing pleasing ornamentation to many of the tracks and steering the album very much into Albion Band territory. Indeed, if there’s one album this puts me in mind of it’s the Albions’ great LP No Roses (the title of which was actually taken from A Week Before Easter). It really is that good.

Al Stewart

Past, Present and Future 50th Anniversary Edition (Esoteric)

Al Stewart’s 1973 album was an important artistic breakthrough for the Scottish-born folkie who had spent his early years plying standard singer-songwriter fare – love, loss, alienation, – albeit with a marked literary bent. His interest in history had occasionally seeped into the odd song, such as Manuscript, from the Zero She Flies album, but Past, Present and Future

marked the full flowering of Al’s excursions into historical storytelling, with each decade of the 20th Century being represented in song.

Interweaving the personal with the historical, Al had effectively created a unique musical template, one that he would continue to explore over the next 50 years. Now available in a three-disc set complete with a new remix and 30 bonus tracks this new edition of Past, Present and Future also includes a new mix of a 1974 concert at which many of the album tracks were performed.

Available on CD, Spotify and other streaming services 

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