It’s the sort of thing that would have had the younger Parker seething, but as he points out on the following track the thirty-plus years since he came to prominence have been a Long Emotional Ride (Maybe I’m just getting old or something/But Something broke down my resistance) so despite the fact that he sees snake oil everywhere he realises there isn’t a whole lot he can do about it.
Long Emotional Ride has a fair dose of the confessional about it as Parker looks back on his career and notes recently acquired wisdom with a degree of wistfulness and a rough-hewn tenderness that runs on into Stop Cryin’ About The Rain. The totally self-explanatory She Rocks Me works a snappy semi-skiffle groove while Three Chords Good would have fitted comfortably on any of those earlier GP&R albums. There’s a touch of Mose Allison to leaven the Van Morrison influences on the slower, moody Old Soul, a track that swings sensuously with Bob Andrews’ Hammond B-3 organ to the fore (as it is throughout).
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.