Edwyn Collins: Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, review: A retiree with joy in his heart
Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation is Collins's 10 th solo album, a glittering gem of beautifully crafted songs the equal of any he has released in his career. The title was the original BBC World Service motto, which adorns an art deco radiogram speaker in Collins's studio. He employs it sweetly in a title song that lightly brushes off contemporary troubles in the world by referencing his own well-documented struggles with aphasia, following a double cerebral haemorrhage that almost killed him in 2005.
Although he has physical restrictions on his right side, with one arm locked in a permanent crook, the remarkable recovery of his singing voice and restoration of his musical abilities has been incredibly heart-warming to bear witness to. 'If I can talk to you, and you can talk to me, how can nation speak unto nation?' Collins asks over a gentle but propulsive groove.
There are shades of the off-kilter punkiness of Collins's only major hit, the deathless 1994 single A Girl Like You (which has rumbled across the airwaves and popped up on soundtracks for three decades now, and currently stands at over 136 million streams on Spotify). That sense of mantric grooving is evoked too on Strange Old World ('but it's my world') and the playful psychedelic coda to A Little Sign with its glockenspiel hook. Collins's songs are always elegantly assembled, with flowing melodies and countermelodies, delicate hooks, soaring bridges and replete with surprising touches that can make you reflect on the lyrical message from different angles.
As a prime mover in the 1980s indie rock scene with his DIY Scottish record label Postcard and wonkily brilliant post-punk band Orange Juice, Collins has been a minor yet significant figure in the British music scene for a long time. He is a purveyor of a critically admired brand of 'perfect pop' that was never really perfect, and rarely all that popular. His references tend to draw on dated ideals of Sixties beat groups, soft psychedelia and Northern Soul, with quirky touches that shift out of the realm of purist nostalgia. There is a gentleness to his oeuvre that makes even his rockiest charges easy on the ears, and a life-enhancing positivity that suggests music made with a smile on its face.
The 11 songs here are another slice of juicy joy, and the final track implies that it won't actually be the last we hear from him. 'I guess it's true, I'm working on a new song,' he admits on the outro bossa nova track, Rhythm Is My World. You've got to have something to keep you occupied during retirement.
Best New Songs
By Poppie Platt
Chappell Roan, The Giver
First performed back in November on Saturday Night Live, the most exciting young star in pop returns – post-Grammys win for Best New Artist – with a foot-stomping slice of country that sounds like an overtly sexualised, lesbian-power spin ('Baby, I deliver / Ain't no country boy quitter') on Shania Twain's classic anthem Any Man of Mine.
Cliffords, Bittersweet
There are some terrific shoegaze and post-punk bands emerging from Ireland, including NewDad, Just Mustard, Sprints and Cliffords, rising talents from Cork whose plucky latest single pays heartfelt tribute to their hometown.
Lizzo, Still Bad
Having made it out the other side of near-cancellation after she was accused of bullying by members of staff, Lizzo returns with a dancefloor-ready disco anthem accompanied by – what else! – a video depicting her being covered in fake blood and chased by villainous dancers with bird beaks. A not-so subtle nod to the Twitter critics, one assumes?
Loren Kramar, Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have – But I Have It
A gorgeous project, this: LA-based singer-songwriter Loren Kramar has channelled earlier taunts about being in touch with his feminine side into a collection of Lana Del Rey covers, called Living Legend. Hope Is A Dangerous Woman… from Del Rey's 2019 masterpiece Norman F---ing Rockwell! is first up.
Sugababes, Jungle
Noughties girl-group icons Sugababes have had quite the few years: sold-out tours, so much demand for last year's Glastonbury set they literally shut down the West Holts stage. Now the trio return with an infectious, garage-influenced banger just begging to be blasted at summer parties.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
A sensory awakening: the adventures of a cheesemonger
Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of 'biographies' of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally's recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty's The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs of those who sell or serve food. These foodie books often blur at the margins and merge at the borders but usually share the characteristic of being narrated in the first person – and if recipes are given they are often incidental. (Of course, many of these authors also write cookery books.) There is a canon of such tomes by writers including Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, Jane Grigson, Wendell Berry, Julia Child, Patience Gray, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Wechsberg; and, more recently, Claudia Roden, Raymond Sokolov, Jeffrey Steingarten, Jonathan Meades, Bill Buford and Nigel Slater. Besides the quality of their writing, these memoirs have in common wit, grace, delicacy and introspection. Though it tells mostly of the pleasures of food, Fisher's work exemplifies these virtues. When she writes about youthful hunger, for example, she reminds us that it is a thing apart: It is very hard for people who have passed the age of, say, 50, to remember with any clarity the hunger of their own puberty and adolescence… But I can recall its intensity still; I am not too far from it to understand its ferocious demands when I see a 15-year-old boy wince and whiten at the prospect of waiting a few more hours for food. Fisher wrote this in 1946, when she was a sympathetic matron of 38. She remains one of the few food memoirists to take hunger and its feeling as a subject. Finnerty, now aged 54, works part-time at Mons Cheesemongers in London's Borough Market and part-time in Montreal, Canada, where he broadcasts a weekly live radio programme in French. His genre-defying book is an account of how he dealt with his mid-life predicament by taking leave from his job as a high-flying journalist to train as a cheesemonger. It's a remarkable tale, with only a tinge of bathos. Born in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, he spent 'the better part of a year' in secondary school as an exchange student with a French family in St-Étienne, where he had his first experience of non-supermarket cheese. There's a lacuna in the narrative and the reader never learns how or why he ended up in London, working as a researcher, then a reporter, then a producer for the BBC World Service and finally 'multimedia news editor' for the Guardian for '15 years on either side of the Millennium' . In 1999 he even bought an ex-council flat in Southwark, and in 2002 met his life partner, 'a beautiful, compassionate, eccentric and understanding Frenchman', about whose movements and whereabouts we somewhat annoyingly learn nothing more. Finnerty left his successful London life to return to Montreal, where for 13 years he presented Daybreak, the CBC early morning live radio show. He was well-paid, well-regarded and had fame of a sort: 'Hell, my face is on billboards and on the side of CBC trucks.' But, he writes, the job was 'robbing me of joy'. It seems obvious that the killer factor was the uncivilised hours – getting up at 3 a.m., having 'lunch' at 8 a.m. when the programme finished, needing sleep as well as food at anti-social times. So he negotiated a six-month sabbatical and went to live in his London flat. It soon occurs to him that both morale and his bank balance indicate that he should find a temporary job; and a meal in an Ottolenghi restaurant so tickles his foodie fancy that he applies to be a waiter there and works a trial shift, but fails. With lowered spirits, he sees an advert in Borough Market for a trainee cheesemonger, cheers up, applies, is taken on as an apprentice, passes his three-month probation and gets the job without ever mentioning his prior career. Finnerty is physically fit – which is just as well, since every day starts with sweeping, hauling out wheels of cheese, moving large tables, climbing ladders, moving boxes, wrapping with focus and precision, manipulating slates, cutting down through the thick pastes of Cheddars and Alpine cheeses with both hands on a knife, scrubbing surfaces to free them of cheese residue, bleaching and squeegeeing floors and rearranging the furniture. He is so tired that he longs only to be horizontal, not even experiencing the hunger or thirst Fisher details so eloquently. One attraction of his brave new career is the fraternity of fellow cheesemongers and market personnel – his descriptions and evaluations of them and his customers display the best writing in this book, and show that he is curious and cares about them as much as he does about the cheese he is handling and selling. There are a few outstanding set pieces, such as the account of the November 2019 knife attack at Fishmongers' Hall, at the north end of London Bridge, which spread into Borough Market and resulted in Finnerty and some of his colleagues and customers taking refuge in the cheese fridge. While much of this memoir is about Finnerty's state of mind and feelings, he does not neglect the subject of his subtitle. Every chapter ends with a page or two on a single cheese, always readable, sometimes funny, in the manner of his great predecessors Pierre Androuet and Patrick Rance. He's in love with cheese, passionately, and it shows. At the end of his sabbatical, as he prepares to return to Montreal and broadcasting, he worries about whether he's deceived his mates and his boss. In the end he finds a compromise. Next time you're shopping for cheese in Borough Market, ask if Michael is there to serve you.
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Irvine Welsh documentary was a fitting end to close the EIF
Irvine Welsh is full of stories, one reason he is such a prolific author. He isn't short of anecdotes, either, or of opinions. These range from politics to what he mockingly refers to as his 'practice', in other words his approach to fiction writing. But he also has the raconteur's gift of delivery and – whisper it – a whiff of the public intellectual to him. God knows we need that breed these days. Throw in his oeuvre (another term he probably hates) and his authorship of the most iconic Scottish novel of the last 30 years, and you can see why he is such a rich subject for a documentary. Unsurprisingly there have been a few to date. But Edinburgh-based film-maker Paul Sng's is undoubtedly the best, making it a welcome and fitting work to bring down the curtain on this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival. Artful, considered, imaginative, rewarding, though-provoking and pleasingly high concept, it avoids dwelling too much on past glories to foreground its subject in the present. Read More: We open, though, with a sort of career précis. It comes courtesy of clips from an onstage interview conducted at a Toronto literary festival by Welsh's fellow Edinburgh-er Michael Pedersen, fast approaching national treasure status himself. Still in Canada, we then see Welsh visit the offices of a couple of lifestyle/therapy gurus in order to take hallucinogenic drug Dimethyltryptamine. Known as DMT – or, sometimes, the businessman's drug, because the trip it induces can be had in a lunch-break – it offers Welsh a break from the reality which he says is 'not enough' for a writer and from which Sng takes his intriguing title. Having brusquely headed off some therapy-speak 'bullshit' from the shaven-headed wellness dudes – just give me the drug is Welsh's simple request – he takes to a mattress to enjoy the experience. We return to him there throughout, Sng using this as a framing device and as a slipway to launch the free-wheeling sequences in which Welsh, dressed in white suit and t-shirt, wanders through an abandoned factory as images and colours are projected onto him and the walls. These sequences are trippy and psychedelic, and have the effect of making it look as if he is in some liminal space, or is being invited to amble through a dream version of his own life. Much of the projections show old footage of Edinburgh, causing the author to reflect on his early life, the death of his parents, his use of drugs, his reasons for first picking up a pen. 'I wouldn't have been a writer if it hadn't been for Acid House,' he says at one point. Sng also drops in excerpts from Welsh's novels, accompanied by even trippier visuals. The obliging readers include Liam Neeson (a passage from The Acid House), Stephen Graham (Glue), Maxine Peake (Porno), Ruth Negga (Dead Men's Trousers) and, last, an unspecified voice with a very slight Australian lilt. Could it be? It is: Nick Cave, reading from The Blade Artist. Too much of this would be, well, too much, so interspersed with the curated readings and the jazzy visuals are more prosaic sections. We see Welsh and his wife Emma at Traquair House in the Borders following a book festival event. We watch him play football with childhood friends in Muirhouse, at the ground of Lowland League football club Civil Service Strollers, then chatting easily with them in the bar afterwards. We see him in LA with his manager, at his house in Miami, and at the boxing club he frequents there. Sng controls and presents his material well, though it's Welsh's own observations, thoughts and opinions which really drive the film. Some are just wryly humorous. 'Married to me? I think it would be a hard shift,' he says, the only time he answers an off-screen question. Others are more reflective. 'Writing ... is essentially a square go with yourself,' he says. Then, later: 'You steal from your own life. You're constantly putting fangs in your own fucking neck.' And: 'The most important resource you have is time. I basically retired 30 years ago, I've just been indulging myself since.' But it's one of his post-trip comments which lingers most in the mind. 'I'm no longer an atheist,' he says. 'It makes dying a more exciting thing than a thing to dread.' No sign of that yet, though – it's very much a life and an appetite for life which Paul Sng's commendable documentary celebrates and explores.
Press and Journal
3 hours ago
- Press and Journal
Exclusive: How superfast broadband could turbocharge Belladrum Festival
If you were a returning festivalgoer at Belladrum this summer, you may have noticed your phone signal was better than in previous years. And that basic improvement could be about to unleash exciting new ideas for improvement at the popular Tartan Heart Festival. That's because the event now benefits from superfast 10 gigabit per second broadband being rolled out across rural areas in the Highlands. Organiser Dougie Brown said the improved connectivity was a 'gamechanger' for campers and traders. For example, businesses were able to process card payments smoothly. And families could keep in touch by accessing four wi-fi hotspots across the festival site. 'It was pretty flawless,' Dougie said. Dougie hopes the next step will be to have seamless wi-fi connectivity across the whole festival site. And the superfast broadband has given organisers some fresh ideas for what could come next. Concert highlights are already shown on the BBC. But future editions of Belladrum could perhaps see more live gigs streamed. And the ultra-fast internet could even result in quirky ideas like introducing online gaming at the festival. 'We're in the Highlands, but the reality is we're on a level playing field now with any big city, which is great,' Dougie said. Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival has been steadily growing for years. It can now hold up to 25,000 people and is the biggest camping music festival in Scotland. Organisers hailed this year's event as 'incredible'. We have already revealed how Highland businesses have been cashing in on the festival. And organisers are aiming big – with an open invitation to Scottish superstar Paolo Nutini. A 2014 report estimated visitors spent around £3.3 million at that year's festival. The event brought a £4.4 million boost to the local Highland economy. And those figures are only likely to have gone up in the 11 years since then given the festival's growth. Festival chiefs hope to soon commission another report to find out how much the event now contributes each year. 'Sometimes festivals are seen as frivolous fun, but there's huge economic impacts they have to the local area,' Dougie said. Belladrum is far from the only beneficiary of improved broadband. Recently we revealed how ultra-fast wi-fi was changing lives in Grantown as the Scottish Government announced Highland Broadband will receive £50 million. Dougie spoke to the Press and Journal after meeting Labour MP Chris Bryant, the UK Government telecoms minister. Mr Bryant was also interviewed by the P&J during his trip to Strathpeffer. He touted Belladrum as a huge success story for connectivity. 'It's been transformative for them,' Mr Bryant said.
