Angela Perley isn’t someone who wears her influences lightly; from sixties guitar rock through seventies country rock (Fleetwood Mac perhaps) to jangly eighties bands like The Bangles, The Go Gos and Katrina & The Waves. There’s also a touch of country/Americana thrown in, particularly on the penultimate song, ‘Holding On’, with its over-driven slide guitar and the pedal steel that adds just a tinge of blue to the entire album. Apart from the album’s final song, the solo piece ‘Wreck Me’, the songs are all fairly big productions with guitars facing off against each other, keys adding different textures and, of course, the sad machine pitching in with plaintive fills. To get the best from ‘Turn Me Loose’, you probably need to listen to it on the freeway (which sounds cool in a way that motorway never will) with the electric guitars playin’ way up loud.
From the opening song, ‘Plug Me In’, which channels the country rock of Eagles’ ‘Take It Easy’, adds a middle finger attitude and the urge to be moving which runs through the whole album with references to cars, planes, motorcycles, taxis, planes and even roller skates. Angela Perley’s desperate to be on the move; she needs to go somewhere, anywhere. Maybe it’s the inevitable reaction to a couple of years of movement restrictions after a long career as a touring musician – it’s certainly a theme that permeates the album.
‘Ripple’ is where Seventies glam-rock meets Lynyrd Skynyrd/Allman Brothers boogie; the riff is simple and the song’s driven along by powerhouse drumming as Angela sings about some of the things she wants to escape (including the vampires of the music business). Her influences are very clear musically and lyrically on the Sixties-inspired flower power-evoking ‘Near You’ with the reference to a “mellow fellow” and an almost English intonation in the lead vocal that harks back to the Sixties British invasion era.
‘Turn Me Loose’ is a collection of ten diverse songs pulled together by the combination of clean and over-driven guitars, Angela Perley’s musical influences and an itch to get out there and experience life again. You should listen to it on Route 66 in the summer, but you might have to make do with the M6 in spring. Either way, it’s going to sound great.
‘Turn Me Loose’ is available now from www.angelaperley.com.
Have a listen to the foot-stomping ‘Ripple’ here:
I have a huge admiration for great songwriters; crafting songs that perfectly convey little slices of life or eternal truths without knowing whether the song will reach half a dozen or millions of people or whether it will hibernate for years and emerge as a shiny (and profitable) hit. Nick Lowe was virtually potless after having a string of hits in the late seventies/early eighties when “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” appeared on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard” as a Curtis Stigers cover in 1992. Kimberley Rew’s career took a slightly different trajectory; as a member of Katrina and the Waves, after several years grinding around Air Force bases and Canadian Clubs, he wrote the massive hit “Walking on Sunshine” and Eurovision winner “Love Shine a Light”, and The Bangles had a minor hit with a cover of his song “Going Down to Liverpool”.
After Katrina’s departure in 1999, Kimberley carried on writing and recording with his partner and bass player Lee Cave-Berry. The songs were still superb, but weren’t troubling the charts; this is the period covered by the twenty-one (count them, twenty-one) songs on “Sunshine Walkers”.
Kimberley Rew is a very English lyricist, in the same vein as Ray Davies, Nick Lowe, Chris Difford and Billy Bragg; the songs couldn’t come from another country; there’s a self-deprecation and irony that you don’t find anywhere else. The other thing he has in common with these writers is that they can all conjure great songs out of the most prosaic situations: Chris Difford wrote the lyrics for the Squeeze classic, “Tempted”, on a journey to Heathrow.
And so it goes, on the album’s first song, “The Dog Song”, inspired by seeing dogs on an obstacle course for TV entertainment, is a romp through Chuck Berry territory with humorous lyrics, clever rhymes and perfect harmonies. It gets the album off to a flying start and sets the tone for a bunch of songs covering various musical styles and even a couple of those songwriters’ favourites for occasions that recur annually, “All I Want is You for Christmas” and “Happy Anniversary”.
Of the remaining dozen and a half songs, there’s absolutely no filler and several that push all of my buttons, mainly the quintessentially English ones. “Bloody Old England” is Billy Bragg meets Victor Meldrew homesickness for this grey old country set to a skiffle beat, while the national pride and clever rhymes of “English Road” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an eighties Rockpile album. And let’s not forget “Backing Singer Blues”; I’m not a great fan of the humorous song, but this one actually works. It slightly exaggerates a situation everyone in the business can identify with, and it’s catchy as all hell.
It’s not often that an album can grab my butterfly attention span for twenty-one songs, but “Sunshine Walkers” did it; Kimberley Rew is one of our national treasures whose talents deserve much more exposure.
“Sunshine Walkers” is out now on KL Recording (KL013).
