Over the course of the ten years and five albums between 2011 and 2021, Alan Wilkes amassed a growing pile of songs which, for whatever reason, never made it onto the albums for which there were written. So, as a sort of spring clean, he’s gathered ten of them here, dusted down, remade and reimagined them alongside producer Dave Draper, adding occasional guitar and bass, to finally give Things Too Long Left Unsaid a life of their own.
As such, while their origins are disparate, there’s nevertheless a cohesiveness to their upbeat gloriously noisy guitar pop with tracks that variously cover revelling in music, social media, catfishing and horticulture. One might even speculate that, given his comparison to Tony Hancock, the cover is an allusion to his 60s eggs commercials.
Perversely, it starts with ‘The End’, a show swaying march beat about a relationship that’s run its course (“Cause there’s nothing more we can do/It’s all over for me it’s all over for you”) but tempered with the optimism of “it’s never too late/Reinvention it clings on to the wheels of fate…Pause and replay/Cause we’re coming back again like we never went away/And next time we’ll get it right/And we’ll hit the big time on a Saturday night”. Throughout the album there’s any number of pop music references, the first here being Soft Cell’s Say ‘Goodbye, Wave Hello’ with the line “the future is brilliant” quite possibly alluding to Timbuk 3.
An unashamed and utterly joyful provincial rewrite of ‘Common People’ relocated from London’s St Martin’s College to Bromsgrove and the ‘Shenstone College Disco’ that, opening with stabbing guitar riffs and driving drums recalls drunkenly hooking up for a one night stand (and morning after) with a “girl from San Francisco says she knows Laurence Ferlinghetti”, dancing to ‘Three Times A Lady’ and going back to her place and listening to Astral Weeks, feeding her cat in the morning, then meeting again some years later and her revealing her accent and Ferlinghetti story were fake, before suggesting that they relive that night, but he preferring to hang on to the memory (“I think I prefer the American Girl in her poetic state of redress”) rather than break the spell.
A midtempo, shimmering ballad, ‘Sentimental Music’ is a love song to the listening for pleasure genre with “a pretty tune a proper singer”, and a girl who “doesn’t care for noisy rock bands or for men with poodle hair/Scuzzy punks or metal goths in black who always stop and stare”, outdoing even Michael Weston-King in the number of song titles and references it manages to cram in, among them ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Your Song’, ‘Baby I’, A Want You, ‘Yesterday Once More’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.
Another midtempo steady drum-led rhythm tune with tumbling verses and musical hints back to the flower power late 60s (the lyrics pointedly evoke that) and possibly a twinge of early Pink Floyd) ‘Love At The Garden Centre’ tells of love, ahem, blooming as “Pot plant people in beige corduroys/Glide across the gravel path no noise”, Wendy tends the water sprinkler (cue a nod to ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’) as “He says I love you my hyacinth foxglove my blue bell” and as evening falls “The green houses are locked and they cash up in the shop/She takes hold of his hand and says beware the hemlock/And then they share a kiss behind the garden wall/And they look into the sunset Thomas Hardy would approve”.
Playfulness is fully indulged in ‘All I Want For Christmas Is A Gibson Flying V’ the title of which pretty much speaks for itself and, for nostalgic Birmingham natives, revisits 1973 and namechecks iconic music stores Jones and Crossland Music on Smallbrook Ringway and John Birch Guitars in Rubery, while pop culture references include Noddy Holder, Jasper Carrott and Wishbone Ash album Argus, their Andy Powell listed among such other Flying V exponents as Mountain’s Leslie West, Tom Petty, Keith Richard, Dave Davies and, his first guitar, Jimi Hendrix.
It’s back to the halls of academia (“She studied for a fine art degree in a red brick university”) and he working on a building site having just joined and with sessions on the local BBC for the rock n rolling swagger of ‘Fine Art’ (another with Pulp echoes), and another tale of youthful doomed romance (“She came from a different world/I never stood a chance/She met a Dutch photographer/And he photographed her in her underpants/She wrote to me explaining why we had to say goodbye”). It comes with another wry lyric (“she drew a picture of the queen/Naked in bath for all to see/It’s hanging on my wall/It remains a talking point/When my friends come over to call”), and another meeting up years later, only this time with a different outcome (“I’d been back here for a couple of years/There was no sign of her/I was starting to think I’d made it all up/When out of the blue I took a call/And we went to the zoo and we went to the ball/We caught the bus after the wedding drove into the sunset”).
As you might surmise, ‘Songwriters Of The World’ is a (slightly Ray Davies) paean to those who pursue the craft even if they never get anywhere (“writing songs that don’t always work/Cause all the good ideas have been used up/Yet still they persevere no matter what”), trying to avoid the usual clichés and find new angles to say the same thing while “writing songs about cars and girls/In basement home studios/Alone with their muse and in hock to their heroes”. And while it’s “not easy to write a bona fide classic/That lingers in the consciousness and soothes the hearts of the masses”, it’s a defiant belief in the power of music (“no one’s telling me a song can never change the world/And that was just a dream some of us had, no that’s patently absurd/Don’t tell me everything’s a waste of time/And how to get ahead of the production line”). It ends, in quintessential Peculiar manner with the self-deprecating “I’m the second greatest songwriter this world will ever know/But I’ve yet to have a hit or write for film or TV/Never had a track placed in a horror movie” and the optimistic “we’re gonna to have a ball in the days of enlightenment to come/Everything will change just wait and see/I’ll take my place in musical history” before proceeding with a self-including list that embraces Paul Simon, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Marc Bolan, Roy Harper, Bill Nelson, Holder and Lea and, having alluded to the Prefab Sprout hit earlier, Paddy McAloon.
Music remains the motif with the suitably rowdy strutter ‘Glam Rock Graveyard’ that opens with the cynical observation that “Freedom is a construct rarely achieved/Governments tell lies people are deceived/Artists fight back but nobody cares/And they sell out after a couple of years” but becomes another celebration of those who keep their fires burning (among them Thurston Moore, The Cramps, even if listening to them is “like visiting the dentist”) because “If you want something bad enough you have to fight” and hold true to self-belief (“Someone says you never know this one could be a hit”). And how can you not love a song that sports the line “It’s not every day Suzi Quatro gives you head/In a simulation game you might live to regret”.
There’s one last turn of the doomed romantic card with the steady walking beat and ringing notes of the bittersweet ‘The Man Who Loved You’ that starts out with happy days “bought the chocolates and the underwear”) only to all fall apart (“Daily grind races on/Until all the good they had together is gone/Like he hardly knows you/There are elephants in every room/Sad melodies in every tune/In every testing one two/And when it all comes crashing down…you can no longer bear to be around/The man who loved you”), but still manages a grace not end with “of course I wish you all the best/I feel grateful I feel blessed/To be a man who loved you”.
Leah Wilkes on backing vocals, it closes with the almost cosmic Bowie feel of ‘Fluffy Kitten’, a suitably sardonic swipe at social media addiction and the banality of so many of the posts (“Fluffy Kitten chasing a clockwork mouse/With a toddler and a toilet roll in a modern suburban house/Strangers talk about it and write comments on my wall/I met a neighbour in the supermarket they said I don’t know how you keep up with it all/I said it’s just a fluffy kitten they said but oh so cute/And then we did a selfie, and they helped me put my shopping in the boot”) and the myriad funny pet memes (“Next day I posted a video of a dachshund in a waistcoat behind the wheel of a toy car/And I’m sharing it with you now hoping you do the same/Fingers crossed everybody fingers crossed this one goes properly insane”), the underlying serious note being how we validate our lives by the likes we get (“Fluffy kitten you only went and saved my life/Now everybody loves you everybody says you’re a delight”).
Received wisdom says some things are better left unsaid. That’s decidedly not the case here.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.vinnypeculiar.com
‘All I Want For Christmas Is A Gibson Flying V’ – official video:
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