Tag: Ian Whitmore

Although he’s been making music since 1974, primarily as part of Starry Eyed And Laughing, the UK’s answer to The Byrds, more recently his 12 string Rickenbacker having been integral to the sound of Bennett-Wilson-Poole, this is the first time Tony’s released a solo album. Playing pretty much everything, with contributions from Nick Holland on keys alongside SE&L bandmate Iain Whitmore and Robin Bennet from The Dreaming Spires on harmonies, while those Byrds influences are still there they’re complemented by those drawn from The Beatles and Big Star, bringing a cocktail of 60s pop and psychedelia to the table.

Whitmore on bass and harmonies, those distinctive Rickenbacker chimes kick off the album with the title track and the opening lines “If we don’t have faith in us, What is anything worth?” Initially written about a girlfriend but, inspired by the birth of friends’ twins, it’s now a song about how the hope of the world is carried by the young generation, born innocent into the world, and faith that they resist the toxic influences that will come to surround them because, as he says, “we’re free/To see through what we see/And to see that we’re all as one” and “If we don’t have faith in us/What is anything worth?/If we don’t begin from trust/We’re just some dust blowing round this earth/If we don’t have faith in us/What is anything for?” I’m reminded of Ghandi’s saying “You must not lose faith in humanity/humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty”.

Opening with a nod to ‘Good Day Sunshine’ (the Beatles also there in the Sgt Pepper echoes with sitar sounds and reverse tape effects that set up the false ending and instrumental play-out), the bounce along ‘Chelsea Girls (1965)’ is, as you might imagine rooted in nostalgia for the peace and love era but tempered with the awareness of how that idealism would be assaulted by “a time when Uncle Sam/Would soon be rhyming too well with Vietnam” as he asks “was it all a fever dream The Beatles shared?”. The lyrics find him aboard a No 11 bus (from Fulham Town Hall to Waterloo Station) on his way to Sloane Square as they namecheck Peter Jones (the entrepreneur whose store is located there), Twiggy, Justin de Villeneuve and Ready Steady Go icon Cathy McGowan.

The first of three that push past the five-minute mark, Holland on keyboards and Chris Baylis on atmos guitar, the psychedelic-toned ‘This Slice Of Time’ was inspired by an old demo from his songwriter and percussionist friend Nelson Bragg that concerned the burning of the Amazon Rainforest in order to raise cattle to make burgers. The first verse adapts some of those lines (“Pedro Gonzales clears a forest in Brazil/For a Company grazing cattle for your grill/To feed his family for he knows nobody else will/And the trees are crying for you/The Amazon is dying for you”) , the song then expanding the theme of environmental self-destruction in the name of commerce as he references the Japanese Yushin Maru whaling fleet, the pollution of the oceans (“Sad eye looks back at him through plastic and its garbage trail”) and the effect of deforestation on Easter Island (“Farmer crumbles empty soil through his dry hands/The family feast now bones asleep beneath the white sand/Their earth was silently gone”). An eco warning, it builds to a dramatic musical intensity with fierce guitar solo and multi-tracked a capella vocals, the title explained in the line “Between the heart and the halo of this world/Is a moment that holds us so tight/But you know that it’s oh so narrow”.

Quieter, moodier and meditative with its low register vocals, ‘Chasing The Rain’ is a straightforward song of elusive love (“Dunno how many times I’ve tried to reach you…I don’t know how many tears I’ve cried/How many tears could fall and never touch you”) and a persistence to try and win it (“I will stand at your door one more time/Than however many times I let it close behind me”).

Opening with echoing ringing guitars and following choppy keyboard notes, taking another musical trip down Beatles memory lane (though perhaps The Idle Race are a closer touchstone) ‘Broken Glass’ is another on the theme of love, here asking if love at first sight is a delusion, as the romantically euphoric lines “if you can believe there could really be/Something like a love that you could feel and see/In a heartbeat – everything changes in a heartbeat/And you’ll know there was never a time it wasn’t so/And everything that mattered/To you in your whole before that scattered” give way to the bitter title phrase.

There’s a deeply personal backdrop to the deceptively musically upbeat and Jeff Lynne-like melodically tumbling ‘Dreams of Life’, a song on which he recalls his traumatic boarding school experiences in Bedford, that left him with a recurring nightmare (cue references to Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, Hitchcock and Dr No) of waking up in his dorm (“hanging from a precipice/All my dreams are rearranged in escape recipes”), and of how visions of America captured in the maps of an atlas offered the prospect of a life beyond its terrors (“Like a beacon in the garbage where the past began/I dream freedom from this harness as I casually hang…Out of Bedford on the roof of every old Vauxhall/I dream Pontiacs and Buicks on a golden shore”).

Depression is the subject of the country inflected (Glen Campbell rather than Waylon Jennings) steady walking rhythmic ‘Who Put The Blue (In Your Blue Genes)?’, empathy flowing through the lines “I thought my heart had grown cold/You turned on a light in my soul/Let it be me/Who takes the blue/out of your blue genes”.

There’s a direct protest note struck on ‘Imagine This’ which, with its inexorable drums, was inspired by a photo of a crying girl at the Mexican border, that image directly linked to Trump’s immigration policies (“Children in cages at the border”) but also echoing Martin Niemöller poem ‘First They Came’ (“First they came for the immigrants/Tearing up all law and order… Will it be just a matter of time/Till they come for you and yours?”) before the second verse turns to Nazi Germany (“They read the news in disbelief/They watched the world fall through a looking glass/They had a dream they could exist in peace/They took a train ride to a room of gas”). As you might guess, the title is also a direct nod to Lennon in a call for tolerance as he sings “Imagine every human being/Sharing the world in peace and freedom/You can make real what you can dream/But you really have to see them/Imagine that – no hate, no hunger/Imagine this – no greed, no plunder/Imagine that – we need each other”.

Beginning with strings, prog rock organ and even sleigh bells, the catchy, tumbling and chiming ‘Marcie Dancing (On A Butterfly’s Wings)’, sounding like something McGuinn might have written for Keith West’s Teenage Opera (you might also hear strains of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’), again has personal connotations embedded, with, he singing harmony, the first verse mentioning Robin Bennett’s daughter Marcie (the song written as a response to her view that the similarly titled Joni Mitchell song was a touch glum), his brother Joe’s daughter Susannah and Iain Whitmore’s daughter Joni, the butterfly’s wings nod to Chaos Theory and the song itself an eco protest against corporate greed and a call to take up arms against because “If everybody’s waiting for everybody else/To come and save the world/We’ll still be waiting when it’s too late and we’re past the point of no return”.

It ends with two further lengthy tracks. Taking the pace down and riding a mix of guitar chime and drum machine-like rhythm, synthesised brass and the sounds of birds chirping, ‘Love Or Something’ is the third of a romantic inclination, here in how people come at it from different perspectives (“Seems you’re always just outside the dream/Just this side of what you thought you’d found/But for a moment did you feel it too?/Did you feel known, was it really you?/Or were we both alone/In our own idea of love, or something”).

Described as an allegory in the tradition of a David Crosby song (though “Manny calls the bartender for another Tray of Pain” is probably more Dylan in its imagery) and featuring, Holland’s Ray Mazarak-like keys and guest guitar solos by Glenn Phillips, it rounds off with the epic psychedelically swirling seven-and-a-half-minute progressive rock ‘Film Noir’, the sounds of film moving through projector gates heralding the steady heavy drum beats and rasping notes, the lyrics alluding to Tolkien’s twelve rings of power, the Lion King who’s more a mule pointing to the Oval Office and the “Clowns of Cool in their own Puppet Show”.

Not as immediately radio friendly as previous band ventures perhaps, but the more you listen the harder it becomes to ignore the hooks it sinks into your heart and mind. As George Michael didn’t quite say, you gotta have faith in us.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.starryeyedandlaughing.com/tony-poole

‘Faith In Us’ – official video: