HEATH COMMON – Encounters With Light (Hi4Head Records HFHCD017)

EncountersWithLightI think it’s fair to say that Heath Common is unique. He lives in Scarborough and has been a journalist and a head-teacher and got his break in music supporting The Pink Fairies aged just fifteen. If John Cooper Clarke were a singer he’d sound like Heath Common who, paradoxically, can sound like Jake Thackray at times. Heath Common is not his real name.

Encounters With Light is about all sorts of things, notably dead celebrities. The opener, ‘Icarus’, reflects on the dangers of sudden stardom, citing Jimi Hendrix’s last night on earth and written as though Heath had watched him leave Ronnie Scott’s. That didn’t happen on the day he died but it makes for a good song. ‘Lennon’ describes the man old and seemingly destitute – of course that is pure fantasy, too – and includes a beautifully gentle verse of ‘Love Me Do’.

‘Two Immortals’, co-credited to beat poet Gary Snyder, tells of a meeting with two elderly men, one of who claims to have written ‘If I Had The Wings Of An Angel‘. This is another unlikely story as Vernon Dalhart died in 1948. ‘Lenny Bruce’ has the singer observing that he doesn’t want to be Lenny Bruce any more. Are these Bruce’s thoughts or those of someone who thinks of himself as being in Bruce’s situation? Heath is just playing with us, isn’t he? Floating ideas past us to see what happens?

The best song, for my money, is ‘Diggers Not Dead’, presumably referring to the political descendents of the men who dug up St. George’s Hill. But why the references to Scott McKenzie and San Francisco?

Musically, the album is as full of musical styles as it is of lyrical ideas. ‘Angeline Albertine’ begins with slightly hysterical laughter before going into a Cossack tune with overtones of German brass and a touch of ‘Monster Mash’ and that is not untypical. All the songs are credited as co-writes, reflecting the contributions of the musicians to the overall sound, notably Tina Featherstone’s clarinet, saxophone and flute, but also Steve Karavasili, Steve J Jones, Neil Morgan and Chris Halliwell.

I don’t pretend to fully understand Heath Common or Encounters With Light but I’m really enjoying it.

Dai Jeffries

Artist’s website: http://www.heathcommon.com/

Not a great video, but …. ‘Two Immortals’:


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