The tempo picks up with Miller’s Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Round, largely drum-driven, with a touch of the call and response about the vocal line, which again mightn’t be intoning the most philosophical analysis of society you’ve ever heard but it works.
Baby’s House, a Miller/Hopkins co-write, provides a welcome change of pace largely built around layered vocals, Hopkins’ piano and Sidran’s organ with nice echoes of the slower material off the earlier albums. Clocking in a tad under nine minutes, it’s magnificently understated.
I’ve heard plenty of versions of Motherless Children over the years. Clapton’s riff-driven offering and Jeff Lang’s up-tempo cover are two favourites that spring to mind. Miller slows it right down, keeps it simple and the result works as well as any of the others and better than many more formulaic versions. Electronic touches. tinkling harpsichord and tasteful guitar work from Miller, demonstrating that he can play. As in so many cases the secret isn’t in the notes you play but in the ones you leave out.
Turner’s The Last Wombat In Mecca doesn’t have any obvious links to Australia or Islam, but does feature some tasty acoustic guitar. Beyond that I haven’t got a clue what it’s about.
The album starts to build up to a memorable end with Miller’s Feel So Glad, pushed along by Hopkins’ stately piano runs behind Miller’s heartfelt vocal. Deceptively straightforward. Finally there’s the title track, written by Davis, where a swirling organ and strummed acoustic introduction switches to a spooky echoing spoken passage, which in turn turns into an uplifting extended play-out bringing a classy album to a classy conclusion.
After four quality albums I had high hopes for Number Five. Unlike the current situation where news of forthcoming releases is flashed around the internet, followed by a wave of discussion, speculation, analysis of leaked copies and so on, there was nobody around to sound the warning bell when it transpired that Glyn Johns had been eased out of the producer’s chair and Miller had eased himself into it. Apart from that, on the surface the only obvious differences between Number Five and its predecessor was the sharing of bass duties between Lonnie Turner and Bobby Winkelman and a bit of harmonica from Charlie McCoy. The writing credits looked much as before with a track from Winkelman and a Miller/Scaggs collaboration, but the album was, in a number of ways, a major disappointment.