Rediscovering 'Cresties' by Jimmy Andrex

"Garden needs doing

Clogged up with a month of growth

I've never seen before

Must be the weather we've been having

Lawn needs cutting

Firm weeds with alien roots

We've not seen before

Taking over beds that were tended by green fingers

Busy pulling tube white shoots

White fingers, fiddling, pulling at cannulas

Pieling white walls, sterile chat

No win for wise cracks"
except from 'You're Home' by Jimmy Andrex
 

Curry's car park on the outskirts of Sheffield.  PC World.  The skies have opened and great globules of industrial rain are hammering the car.  Pissy world.  It's getting dark earlier and I have time to kill between the leave work and start play.  A gig later in the city centre and a bag of chips right now .. with some familiar sounds. 

Looking down at the empty door well I remember the clear out a few days back .. parking tickets, a leaking biro, sweet wrappers, an empty plastic bottle and .. all the random CDs I'd been carting around for months. Radio was a last resort, so I checked the glove compartment (where there were no gloves) but lurking underneath a users manual was 'Cresties' by Jimmy Andrex, I wondered where that album had got to.  I took out the disc and polished it on my shirt and then shoved it in the player.

Cresties is a compilation of poems put to various musical instrumentation, from looped cello, electric guitars to bicycle bells.  And according to the man himself:

"The word Cresty is a Five Towns word meaning someone
scruffy or dirty, but has a wider meaning as a loser or person whose life is a mess. It's a bit like chav, but as in 'Eh, Kingy, you get bathed wi yer dog, yer a right Cresty,' etc etc In our piece, it's celebrating all of us whose lives might look like a mess but still persevere unheralded, derided but heroic, I say. Don't look down on them, celebrate."
 

The first track 'Hearth' is amongst my favourites and one I have happily seen Jimmy Andrex perform. Finger picked ukulele and spoken word, it also has the warmth of home and is all about exactly that. 

Red Line begins with the dramatic urgency of cello and drum machine, describing (what sounds like) a risky bike ride through a cityscape on the way to work.  You can sense the rush of traffic as Jimmy Andrex takes his life in his hands in a land of growing anti-cyclist sentiment.

Another favourite is 'Jack L in Cork Rain' where Jimmy describes a poorly attended festival as the rain fails to dampen peoples spirits and there is a sense of togetherness, a Cresties moment perhaps?  The combination of bicycle bell and strummed ukulele works beautifully. 

A little later, having listened to the entire album, two shoppers have pulled their jackets up over their heads and are running for a the only other vehicle in this car park.  I'm beginning to think there will be no other bugger out tonight and the venue will be empty.  But a gig is a gig and I'm committed to the night, rain or no rain, people or no people.  The last chip is a sharp barbed crisp of a thing and the turn of a key in the ignition.

Rediscovering 'Cresties' was a good way to fill that down time.  The album suited the waiting room moment, reflecting on places, people, histories and cityscapes.  As I drove off I put 'You're Home' on again to play, the best track on the album in my opinion.

Catch Jimmy Andrex performing Cresties as part of the Wakefield Literature Festival on 24 September 2015 from 19.30 - 21.00 at Eye Wood, 12 Wood Street, Wakefield

 

Irrelevant Fiction by Robert Sharp

Remember the journey, it was bright and early..

A long drive to North Devon from West Yorkshire.  Keeping musical company with Robert Sharp's latest album: Irrelevant Fiction.  Complex, intricate and welcome song writing helps to make the M1, M42 and M5 motorway monotony much less of a chore.  Mum's not well and we are all worried about her continuing dysphagia.

The title track begins with gentle acoustic picking and electric guitar, before launching into perfect driving music - stopping and starting like the gridlock.  Robert's voice, a smooth chanter, with jagged breathed edges, a painting of pictures on silence with unexpected melodic twists and turns.  I try to pull out the words, but can't always follow them, these songs are impressions of events and places, journeys for complex men and women everywhere.

The traffic has cleared and the sun has come out for the A361 to Barnstaple.  'On We Go' is playing for the fifth time, selected for another listen and then another, I am drawn to its Americana influence.  Uplifting in the afternoon light.

[Later: Mum is lying on her bed and my Uncle is standing over her, holding her hand and there is a moment there, a look in his eye, a question about age and ageing, the separation of hundreds of miles and lack of mobility.  This business of getting old is a bastard, he says.]

The return journey is a never ending eight hour monster.  Return journeys always seem more arduous.  I discover the final track on the album 'Avoid the Mirror' - an accordion fuelled piece of beautiful darkness.  A great thumping bass line.  There are tears in my eyes, the realisation of the last few days - lovely moments that go unmentioned and difficult moments too, like waves across the passing decades.  Music is a perfect counselling, 'Avoid the Mirror' brings it all home, dark, dark town where we all fell down ..

All music has a context, it takes place in a time and place where things are happening in our lives.  This album is not irrelevant and I suspect much of it is not fiction, I sense a reality and heart felt reasoning.  It is full of dramatic highs and lows, just like my journey to Ilfracombe and back.

Buy this album, enjoy it, embrace it.

LISTEN AND FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE SONG WRITING OF ROBERT SHARP HERE: