LaRM day 144 (Fairport Convention-Faith No More)

Ugh, this awful Blogger site is just horrible to use again.  Anyway, we move into the last stage of our Fairport session with 1975's Rising for the Moon.  This was the one Fairport studio album on which Sandy appeared again after she originally left the band in 1970.  Her solo career hadn't been the success she had anticipated and she pinned her hopes on a Fairport success.  A vain hope one would have thought she'd know at the time, but I think she was getting desperate and couldn't really see the wood for the trees at this point (besides which, as discussed previously, her personal life was pretty much in freefall by this point).  Rising for the Moon is a strange album, it has a lot of the Simon Nicol/Dave Pegg/Swarb folky nonsense, but as before Sandy brought a rigour and a determination to stay contemporary in sound if not in style and as such it's easily their best album since Full House.  This is due, unsurprisingly, almost solely to Sandy's songwriting contributions to the album which, although on occasion rather cloyingly instrumented, are some of the best she ever wrote ('Stranger To Himself' is simply an astonishing piece of songwriting).  It's not a great album, but it's a good one and it's really Fairport's last gasp as a credible act rather than a revivalist throwback act.











Finally it's the Best of the BBC Recordings album, which cherrypicks from a box-set, covering session recordings between 1968-1974 and released in 2008.  Unsurprisingly, the choices focus pretty heavily on Sandy's contributions and there are some interesting versions of some big numbers of here ('Reynardine' and 'Tam Lin' get nice workouts) and there are some surprising late inclusions, such as the brooding 'John the Gun'.  It's not essential but it's all pretty informative.

Now, can anybody explain to me how it came to pass that Marianne Faithfull was ever given a record contract?  I suspect that it's because back in the day middle class execs in the music biz would go to the equivalent of Fortnum & Mason to find their mediocre talents to flog (whereas these days of course the self-same middle class execs go to the equivalent of the bins round the back of Aldi to find their mediocre talent).  Anyway, Faithfull released her first two albums simultaneously and the folk one, Come My Way (1965), is the one that I've got, and it sounds exactly like what it is: the pointlessly sub-standard work of an over-privileged young woman who was offered the opportunity to make records and couldn't be bothered to think of something else to do instead.  Dismal cover of 'Blowin' in the Wind'? Check.  Horrible over-emoted reading of 'Jabberwocky'? Check. The ultimate reveal of an absence of imagination, a version of 'House of the Rising Sun'? Check.  Honestly, it's really rather a ghastly little record, and when she starts singing a French revolutionary folk job (in French, of course), all patience with Faithfull is exhausted.  It really doesn't help to know that this nonsense was made at the same time as she was justifying cuckolding her husband with Jagger by saying basically "it was like a really heavy trip, because people should just be free, and he wouldn't let me be free, I mean he wouldn't even buy me a pony". Come My Way is a truckload of nothing and although it's got genuine curiosity value, culturally speaking, as a record it's so thin that it's transparent.

Next up we have what may well be the worst single ever released, which is why I've got it.  It's Dani Behr's pre-TV career girl band Faith, Hope & Charity and their 7" 'Battle of the Sexes'.  I have nothing else to say about this, just click on the cover and experience the full song/video horror for yourself.  It's like being in a nightmare.

The last act up today is the ultimate metal-funk-soul-rock outift, Faith No More.  I always hated the Red Hot Chili Peppers and always liked Faith No More.  I think it's partly because Faith No More seemed like a mixture of really nice blokes and properly horrible nutcases, whereas the Chili Peppers just seem like a bunch of LA tossers, but mainly because Faith No More's records have some intent, some drive and don't sound like half-arsed, self-satisfied crap.  Anyway, to my mind the best decision that FNM made was to ditch the defunct faux-rap element that they started out with and the high point of their career was the release of Angel Dust (1992).  There's too much of Angel Dust and some of it falls pretty flat (the screamathon of 'Malpractice' doesn't really go anywhere), but when the album works it's a fantastic bit of bile-spewing metal-pop.  Unsurprisingly I guess it's the singles that are the obvious highlights and 'Midlife Crisis', 'A Small Victory' and especially 'Everything's Ruined' are great.  But there's plenty of other grandstanding massive rock on Angel Dust and although there are certainly longeurs on the whole it's a brilliant album of smart-arse frustrated metal.

The 2009 compilation album The Very Best Definitive Ultimate Greatest Hits Collection is a chronological overview of Faith No More's career, over one disc of album tracks and one of rarities and B-sides.  Unsurprisingly but disappointingly almost half of the first disc is culled from Angel Dust and the rest of the material is OK (there's 'Epic' of course, and 'The Real Thing', together with some later tunes and their unnerving cover of the Commodores 'Easy') but on the whole it doesn't really hang together as an overview, being too scrappy and unfocussed.  The rarities disc is certainly interesting but is so often the way most of the material is rare for a reason....

Deep breath because most of next week will involve nothing but The Fall....