In 25 years of record buying, really only a handful of rock albums have struck me as, you'll pardon the expression, complete artistic statements unto themselves -- as original combinations of both lyric and melodic skills informed with enough personality to reward repeat listens over the course of more than, say, a year.
Beyond which, for such a record to really catch me on this level, it has to work as a sort of a show -- as something with a beginning, a middle, and -- you guessed it -- an end, and with some sort of coherent theme running throughout.
Severe demands, I know. Rock record? Hell, most volumes of poetry since the 50s (notable exception: Richard Hugo's The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir) don't fill the bill. And as to the record albums that do, only Sgt. Pepper's (the obvious choice) and, to greater or lesser extents, the Move's Message from the Country, Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, Dylan's John Wesley Harding, Big Star's Radio City, Procol Harum's A Salty Dog, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (Perhaps their Arthur and Lola..., as well), The Band's The Band, and maybe XTC's Skylarking (I can actually make a pretty good case for that last one as pop-music companion-piece to Blake's Songs of Innocence/Songs of Experience, especially if I've had a few) come to mind.
You can, I feel confident in saying, add another one to that list. Martin Newell's The Greatest Living Englishman -- you can almost tell from the title, and certainly from the way the cover art mixes whimsy and menace so effectively -- is such a record. It is charming, eccentric, harrowing, engaging, depressing, and unabashedly entertaining all at once. It is also informed with a sense of compassion seemingly rare amongst those who choose studio pop as their medium of expression: like our favorite books and movies, this is an album with heart.
But I did mention theme, and here the connecting idea has something to do with falling from grace -- whether the aging town hipster mourning the "dreaming fields" of his youth ("Goodbye Dreaming Fields"), the gardener content to live on the edges of grey-flannel society ("Home Counties Boy"), the boy and girl condemned to "cardboard city" by a society more interested in preserving their own wealth ("The Jangling Man," "We'll Build a House"), or, most effective and haunting of all, the pop star who's fallen from the public eye to an early death ("The Green-Gold Girl of the Summer," and to an extent the title track). The "concept," if you wish, is helped along by snippets of sound and conversation credited to one Lol Elliott -- mostly men and women clucking as only the English can cluck at this or that of our protagonists' failures.
Musically The Greatest Living Englishman is an appealing melange of chiming guitars, old-fashioned (i.e., decidedly 60s-ish) piano, organ, and Mellotron sounds, great, galloping drums and bass, out-of-the-norm harmonies, and the sorts of cleverly dramatic string arrangements that one heard before strings became synonymous, in the minds of most pop-product producers and engineers, with sweetening. It's Byrdsian jangle and eel pie combined -- eccentric, as I said, and unabashedly English. Musical influences abound: "A Street Called Prospect" recalls the Kinks at their music-hall best. The title number borrows from producer Andy Partridge's own "Season Cycle." And is it my imagination or does the coda to "The Green-Gold Girl" deliberately refer to the end of Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home, A Heartache"? No matter -- as someone (Lester Bangs?) once said of Mott the Hoople, some artists can swallow their influences whole and still come up sounding like no one but themselves. So here's another one.
Newell's singing voice, like the themes and images he returns to throughout, is itself critical to the record's mood -- of vulnerability and innocence, tempered (corrupted?) by the knowledge that the world is after all not so kind or forgiving or even pretty a place as it once seemed. Not a great singer in the traditional sense (but then more accessible than today's standard-issue, Richard Thompson-style "acquired taste" singers), Newell nonetheless carries it off with great charm and character -- another voice, like that of Ray Davies or Roy Wood, that you'll come to know and perhaps enjoy after just a few spins.
And the songs, in case I need to say it plainly, are catchy as hell. I'm amazed whenever I hear someone wring new, inventive melodies out of rocks's stock-in-trade chord changes, and The Greatest Living Englishman is cause for such amazement. But be forewarned: when you get one or another of these songs caught in your memory and go back to hear it again, it is all but impossible to resist playing the whole record through. And that, as I said, is because this really is a show. You'll want to sit through the whole thing -- not just a scene or two.
This is, in other words, a Great Album -- the kind that leaves you giddy with discovery, not to mention thoroughly moved. And while few rock records deserve such lavish praise, so does it seem a waste of time writing a single word more when you should just be home listening to the thing. If you only ever buy one record on my say-so, honestly -- make this the one.
-- Art Dudley