Andrews is there again on A Lie Gets Halfway ‘Round The World, a track that shows Parker can still rant with the best of them, Mercury Poisoning revisited while he takes aim at the music industry and the mainstream media again. There’s a touch of the doo-wops and Sam Cooke about That Moon Was Low and we’re into boppier territory for Live In Shadows before the trio of tracks that take the album out with a definite bang.
America’s role in Afghanistan and the apathy that has come as the conflict grinds on gets the once-over in Arlington’s Busy (And Arlington's busy and business is brisk, not that you'd notice ‘cos ignorance is bliss) a bristling track that decries lying military officers and politicians in a measured statement of impassioned disgust. Coathangers shows whose side of the abortion debate he’s on and manages to rock out while it does so, and Last Bookstore In Town delivers a wry commentary on the decline of small town niche businesses.
The Parker who emerged from obscurity and a string of dead end jobs in the Channel Islands, Chichester and Gibraltar and a hippy band that gigged in a Moroccan night club was in many ways a reincarnation of the ’50s English Angry Young Man, articulate, antiestablishment and extremely pissed off at the world in general and his social circumstances in particular. The Rumour, a collection of pub rock veterans who’d been around the ridges long enough to know what worked and what didn’t locked right in behind him to provide a worthy antidote to the increasing blandness and orthodoxy of mid-seventies rock.
Thirty-odd years after The Up Escalator it’s good to see the combination back as a unit, with Bob Andrews back behind the keyboards (he’d left before Escalator and been replaced by Nicky Hopkins and the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan). Given their circumstances over the intervening decades (Brinsley Schwarz had been working as a luthier in London, while fellow guitarist Martin Belmont was a Yorkshire librarian) you mightn’t be expecting the old fires to burn quite so bright but taste and an understanding of nuance are timeless and one suspects it’s something like learning to ride a bicycle.
Once you know how, the ability doesn’t desert you.
Parker’s lyrics still bite and there’s a hint of the old snarl, though the anger’s tempered by a curmudgeonly resignation, Andrews’ keyboards weave their way through the melodies, the guitars add crunch and the supple rhythm section sets things up just right.
The result is an album that hearkens back to a pretty damn glorious past, delivers a continuation of the old vibe into the present and leaves this long time fan hoping for more of the same in the future.
That may end up being a case of living in hope and dying in frustration but, in the meantime, at least I’ve got Three Chords Good, a reinvigorated interest in past glories and an inclination to catch ip on what I’ve missed in the interim.