Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Eddi Reader's 1998 record, Angels & Electricity

 

OASIS are not the only well-known band to announce that they are getting back together again. To less fanfare, but undoubtedly to the pleasure of their many fans, Fairground Attraction are returning to the scene, with live dates and a new album, Beautiful Happening, three decades after breaking up.

The quartet - Eddi Reader, Mark E.Nevin, Roy Dodds and Simon Edwards - reached number two on the UK album charts in 1988 with their debut, The First of a Million Kisses. The lead single, Perfect, went to number one, while other singles - Find My Love, A Smile in a Whisper, Claire - also charted, with Find My Love’s peaking at number seven.

At the famously chaotic 1989 Brit awards hosted by Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood, the band won the best album and best single awards (a dual feat only achieved since by Coldplay, Blur and Adele). “Thanks everybody that loves simple music for simple people!”, Reader exclaimed on stage after the album victory was declared.

The band, however, broke up early in 1990. 

Interviewed alongside Nevin on ITV’s This Morning show a few months ago, Reader was asked if the group hadn't quite been ready for all the attention and acclaim that came their way in the late Eighties. “Possibly”, she said, “but I’m glad it happened, because we created a friendship and a connection that I think after all the years … we had families and moved through life. Mark’s been working with amazing people and I've been doing my solo stuff”. The “boys” - Dodds and Edwards, standing behind her, had been working all the time.

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She added: “A couple of years ago, when we were going through the big science fiction thing [the Covid lockdown], it was a bit weird, and a couple of us had a bit of a scare. It was all right, but I just realised anyway that what was really important was that we had a brilliant connection as friends, and that’s what we were into firstly”. The band then played, live, their best-known song.

Interviewed by the Guardian recently, Nevin, who wrote Perfect, said: “Perfect was a real genuine organic hit and it took us all by surprise. All these years later, it’s become almost like Happy Birthday or Auld Lang Syne – so many people know the song without knowing who made it”

The first time it was performed live was at the Duke of Wellington pub in Dalston. “By the time we got to the third chorus”, he recalled, “everyone in the audience was singing along – the reaction was instant. Someone came up to me afterwards and said: “That song is going to be No 1!” Months later it was, which was surreal”.

By the mid-Eighties, as Reader herself said in that interview, she had found some success as a backing singer. “I’d been on The Old Grey Whistle Test with Gang of Four, on Top of the Pops with Eurythmics and Alison Moyet. I’d done my apprenticeship and got a measure of the backside of the music industry. I saw the fickleness”. She met Nevin and they began working on some of his songs. “There’s such a joy and authenticity about Perfect. It’s a song that says: ‘F*** it, this is what I want’. The human condition is always wanting, wanting, wanting. When people hear Perfect, they feel happy”.

After the break-up of the band, Reader embarked on a successful solo career. As her website puts it, it was her [solo] albums “which signalled her increasing ability to assimilate different musical styles and make them all very much her own. Her unerring instinct for fine material, whether self-penned, collaborative or a carefully-chosen cover version resulted in Mirmama (1992), Eddi Reader (1994), Candyfloss & Medicine (1996), Angels & Electricity (1998), Simple Soul (2001)”.

The second-last of these, Angels & Electricity, is particularly fine.

 

It starts in gorgeous fashion with the Nevin-penned Kiteflyers’ Hill, a poignant song in which the narrator wistfully recalls a “wild summer love” from years before. “Where are you now?/My wild summer love/ Where are you now?/ Do you think of me sometimes?”. Reader’s voice on the song, and especially on the chorus, would break the flintiest of hearts.

There are lots of really good songs here: Prayer Wheel, Psychic Reader, Hummingbird, California, and Bell, Book and Candle. Several of the cuts were written or co-written by Reader’s long-term musical partner, Boo Hewerdine.

California was written by Reader herself in tribute to the late Associates singer, Billy MacKenzie, whom she had first met in London in the mid-Eighties, when she was a struggling singer, low on confidence. She sang on an Associates song for an album and afterwards Mackenzie and Reader repaired to the pub. As she later told the Daily Record: “He said to me: ‘That was just brilliant what you did’. I said, ‘Why did you pick me? Why did you phone me up?’ He said, ‘Well, you're the best aren't you?’ He just gave me this massive compliment. Not many people would have done that”.

Another track on the album, On a Whim, was the work of the esteemed songwriter, Ron Sexsmith. "He sent me a couple of verses through the Internet", Reader told Mojo magazine, “he thought they were s***e, and I was 'no no no' and I recorded ‘On A Whim’ within a week of getting it.” Indeed, a lot of the songs on Angels & Electricity were recorded live in the space of a week.

 

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Reader’s voice throughout the album has its customary crystalline beauty. As critic Chris Ingham wrote in his review in Mojo magazine: “Even allowing for our response to singing being largely subjective, some voices just do the job, don't they? For me, Eddi Reader is up there with, for instance, Bonnie Raitt and k. d. lang, singers who combine amazing technical control with emotional authority to make their heart-lifting music sound as natural as breathing”.

Ingham added: “She’s dallied with wordless mood pieces (the gorgeous ‘Howling From Ojai’ from Eddi Reader (1994)) and a big band '40s film theme (‘Town Without Pity’ from Candyfloss And Medicine (1996)), but her default music is gentle, aching songs delicately swathed in acoustic guitars, accordions, electric colours and rolling percussion.

“In Boo Hewerdine, a writing presence on her last two albums and co-producer here, she has an unostentatious, big-hearted craftsman pal whose low-key insight perfectly complements Reader's own understated passion”.

It takes two listens for the quieter songs to blossom in the imagination, Ingham went on. “‘Postcard’'s tales-of-the-river bank finger-picking evolves into an ambient wonder, ‘Psychic Reader’ drifts in a wash of dulcimer and slide. Compared to their natural float Ron Sexsmith's delightful ‘On A Whim’ sounds positively contrived. There's catchy, cool rocking on ‘Hummingbird’ and ‘California’ but it's when the traditional meets the mysterious this music become genuinely alluring”.

The result is one of Reader’s strongest albums, one that repays a close listen.

In late September that same year Eddi Reader played the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. In the words of our reviewer: “she sure knows how to use what she's got: a voice that can pull your heart from your chest, massage it, then put it back plumped-up and revitalised.

“The 38-year-old songstress, in spangly dress and bare feet, was a down-to-earth angel, mesmerising with that ethereal voice and seemingly oblivious to all but the song, as her hands performed wild karate blows on an invisible chopping board. Perhaps the power of that voice was stronger than usual … but offerings from Angels & Electricty, softer, simpler than Candyfloss & Medicine, proved an old Irishman right that truth comes from the rag-and-bone shop of our hearts: her vocal wings take flight from the welter of human experience. And so songs such as California, a yearning for brighter horizons, takes inspiration from the tragedy of singer Billy Mackenzie and the bleak existence known as Dundee”.

* Fairground Attraction play Perth Concert Hall (Oct 14), Aberdeen Music Hall (Oct 16), Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (Oct 17) and Edinburgh Usher Hall (Oct 18). The album, Beautiful Happening, is out now.

Next week: White on Blonde, by Texas.