Alternative truths: Elbow - Little Fictions

As I plummet towards my 50th year on this rock I can, like many my age, be prone to rose-tinted, nostalgic visits to childhood. One strong reminiscence is that of the dozy, cosy feeling on a Sunday afternoon just after lunch. In my house, that would have involved the requisite roast, accompanied by one of my dad's tapes of The Goon Show or Hancock's Half Hour (let me emphasise - these were recordings, I'm not that old...).

Afterwards, as the washing up began, the radio would come on, and the house would semi-slumber to something bucolic on Radio 2 (if memory serves me well, 'Cheerful' Charlie Chester's Sunday Soapbox ("With a box full of records and a bag full of post, it's radio Soapbox and Charlie your host!") followed by the Mike Sammes Singers and Sing Something Simple, before a polite request would be issued to turn to Radio 1 and the Top 40.

I'm reminded of this today when I listen to Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on BBC 6 Music. Not that the Elbow frontman fills his 60 minutes of airtime with whimsy and pre-pop easy listening. Far from it. It's just that Garvey's perfectly curated selections always hit the spot on a Sunday afternoon, especially when coupled with his mellifluous Mancunian tones. You could say the Garvey oeuvre is a warming, welcoming hearth.

Elbow aren't, of course, just Garvey, but the big man's inherent and endearing warmth is a key component of the total band effort. That band is now one less, following the departure of drummer Richard Jupp, but you could even say that, after more than a quarter of a century in business, they are still just hitting their stride. Yes, I know they've had soaring, life-affirming, anthemic hits, but Little Fictions is the album - and still only their seventh - where you feel that Elbow are fully comfortable in their skins.

For Garvey, personally, his own journey is reflected on this record: since Elbow's last (2014's The Take Off and Landing of Everything) he has ended one marriage and commenced another, and released a jazz-ish solo album, Courting The Squall, which appeared to address much of the turmoil of such events. Thus, one is immediately hit by a feeling of wellbeing from the outset of Little Fictions, with Magnificent (She Says) striking a keynote of upbeat goodness as it celebrates togetherness through a narrative of parental pride, "...my heart, there defrosting in a gaze". It sounds saccharine, but here is Elbow's magic - they can do this sort of thing without resorting to cheese or, worse, Coldplayesque bombast. Thus, the lovely Gentle Storm, with its understated chords, Casio keyboard percussion, and the unashamed, plaintive refrain "Fall in love with me - every day", is much, much better to hear than my wretched description is to read.

Later, even tackling post-Brexit national isolation on K2 ("I’m from a land with an island status. Makes us think everyone hates us.") and taking a swipe at Fleet Street there is a reflective warmth, rather than an acerbic froideur. But don't be fooled into thinking this is all down to Garvey: this album was a group effort, largely constructed in open writing sessions up in Scotland. That said, Garvey's fingerprints smudge heavily on the adorable Kindling, which closes the album, and which opens with rhythmic, Velvet Underground-like circularity and the painful confessional "Had a circular saw blade where I should have had a heart. I was trusted, I adored her. And I tore it all apart." This is, however, a rare moment of darkness on the album.

Scotland's role not withstanding, there is something intrinsically - if hard to fully pin down - redolent of northern England on this record. That may come from the dramatic, reverb-enhanced sound that has been the hallmark of Elbow's sound as well as that of peers and local friends Doves and I An Kloot. It's their native Greater Manchester, as if the wet, echoey, melancholia of cobbled northern streets has been sampled and programmed into the mixing desk settings of these bands' studios. This is, though, only an effect, as the overall 48-minute collection is one of eminently pleasing comfort, ideal for these troubled times.

Other influences are brought to bear: Firebrand & Angel chugs along delightfully with piano bass notes reminiscent of Talk Talk, whose more obscure songs are regular features of Garvey's 6 Music show. That same piano emerges of the tender Trust The Sun, another example of carefully weighted minimalism laying beneath more gooeyness as Garvey declares "I just don't trust the sun to rise when I can't see your eyes. You're my reason for breathing". The Velvet Underground return in spirit on All Disco, but not with their customary bleakness - here, in a more understated form, is the cigarette lighters-ahoy uplift of One Day Like This, but instead of a song about embracing the new, it's one of embracing reality, textured by Mark Potter's graceful, well chosen guitar notes. These are also a defining characteristic of Head For Supplies, which alternates between Potter's haunting strings and some wonderful choral arrangements.

Elbow might have been attached to the belief that they are purely a stadium band, despite the "alternative" tag. One Day Like This did that in one fell swoop. But in trying to dispel such thinking, one, single song on Little Fictions - Montparnasse - is all you would need to think differently. With its caustically stripped back approach, it is a magnificent, beautiful, even, piece of songwriting. Like a considered Miles Davis pause, or a single, ringing BB King note, it applies thoughtful minimalism to produce just enough fabric to hold together a declaration of love that, like so much of this album, is heartfelt, genuine and not a bit soppy.

It's always easy to declare a band's latest album their best, until you play it back in comparison with the previous work. But even given the general brilliance of Little Fictions' six predecessors, it's hard not to consider this Elbow's best yet but perhaps, though, for reasons you wouldn't have expected to appreciate.

New dawn for a national treasure - Kate Bush

Of all the 1970s, 1978 comes off as having the least cultural significance. It was no 1971, with its ground breaking albums, or 1976 with the arrival of punk, 1977 with the death of Elvis and the Queen's silver jubilee or 1979 and the coronation of Margaret Thatcher and the subsequent decade of that combined ostentation with social division.

By the start of 1978, punk's vanguard of The Damned, the Sex Pistols and Television had already collapsed, leaving The Clash to keep that particular revolution going, sort of. Out of it emerged the New Wave and the punkish, somewhat less threatening likes of The Jam, The Police, XTC, Siouxie & The Banshees, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and even Dire Straits and their bluesy pub rock. Elsewhere, rock's establishment was consolidating its lot: Bowie spent much of '78 on an epic world tour, the Low and Heroes albums behind him, while the Rolling Stones delivered the patchy Some Girls ahead of Keith running into drug trouble in Toronto. The Who released Who Are You? (yes kids, long before CSI...) and then Keith Moon shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 32 from a prescription drug overdose.

Three years previously, a member of one of the other behemoths of the age had set in train the career of a British national treasure. While mixing Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album, guitarist David Gilmour was handed a demo tape by a schoolgirl from south-east London: Kate Bush. "I was intrigued by this strange voice," Gilmour recently told the BBC. "So I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me - gosh - it must have been 40 or 50 songs. And I thought, I should try and do something." Gilmour arranged for the prodigy to have a more professional tape made before arranging executives from EMI Records to come down to Abbey Road studios to hear it. On the back of what they heard, EMI signed the-then 16-year-old, who had already amassed a catalogue of 200 songs in various forms.

On January 6, 1978, the first single from Bush's forthcoming debut album The Kick Inside was released: Wuthering Heights. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, an extraordinary entrance. Released in a week when the UK singles chart was topped by Paul McCartney's unthreatening Mull Of Kintyre and included such rock monsters as Figaro by Brotherhood of Man, Bonnie Tyler's It's A Heartache and Terry Wogan's The Floral Dance, it was hard to place a song based on an Emily Brontë novel (Bush shares a birthday with the writer) with a vocal sung in a pixie-squeak of a high register.

Who was this 19-year-old, with an audacious song that might be prog rock, might be a MoR ballad, or might be simply avante garde? Whatever it was it went to Number One and stayed there for a month, the first time a female singer-songwriter had got to the top with a self-written song. Four months later Bush released the spine-tinglingly beautiful The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which went to No.6 in the charts. It had been one of the songs that had clinched her signing to EMI, when Gilmour had arranged for executives to hear Bush's demos at Abbey Road Studios. "I said to them, 'Do you want to hear something I’ve got?'," Gilmour recalled to the BBC. "They said sure, so I played them The Man With A Child In His Eyes and they said, 'Yep, thank you — we’ll have it.' It’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? That’s her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics."

By the end of 1978 Bush was already releasing her second album, Lionheart, capitalising on the success of her debut, though the somewhat uninspiring nature of the record - the idiosyncratic hit single Wow not withstanding - suggested a rush job. Regardless, 1978 was still the year that founded one of the most remarkable, if idiosyncratic, music careers, one that has never, ever wielded to convention or commercial expectations. Much like her occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel and the Bowie and Roxy Music she idolised as a teenager, Bush has successfully - and resolutely - bucked convention. It's hard to think of any other artist - with perhaps the exception of Björk who would release an album called 50 Words for Snow which included a song that indeed contained 50 words for snow, and it not coming across as profoundly pretentious.

That album, though, was only her 10th, and it came more than three decades after her first. Bush has always steadfastly dictated the pace of her career, sometimes haphazardly, it would appear. Her 22-night, 2014 residency at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith were her first gigs for 35 years. She had toured only once, in 1979, and while the death of her lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, is reported to have induced a long-standing aversion to live performance, she suggested to BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt last Sunday that her absence from the stage was perhaps down to other forces. "After 1979 the intention had always been to do another set of shows after the first two albums," she explained. "There was never any intention to go such a long time without shows - things just went in a different direction."

Whatever that direction was, the surprise decision to appear in a live setting once more was no less artistically bold and imaginative as any of Bush's songwriting. The 22 Before The Dawn shows - captured in a triple live album released today - brought together Bush's longstanding love of theatricality (Lindsay Kemp - who'd worked closely, in more ways than one, with Bowie had been another early influence and mentor). Part rock concert, part performance art theatre, the shows were split into three acts - the first featuring hits like Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill, with the second and third based on the two long songsuites from the Hounds Of Love and Aerial albums, The Ninth Wave and A Sky Of Honey.

Photo: Ken McKay

"I was really nervous every night," Bush told Everitt, explaining how she worried she would lose her place in the middle of her often complex compositions. "I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind, I'm always thinking about situations and running them through. Maybe it's that kind of primeval thing where you're trying to think, 'Can I get to that tree before the tiger gets me?' So my head is always moving ahead, just trying to get to the conclusion of whatever this journey is. And once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. "But I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off that when I came back I wouldn't remember where I was."

Although such apprehension has been a hallmark of much of Bush's career, she relished the challenge of creating the Before The Dawn concept. "The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting. But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on because I was terrified of doing live work as a performer again," she said in the BBC interview, which portrayed Bush not as a reclusive, publicity-shy British eccentric, but as the mum and occasional pop star she has studiously worked at being seen to be.

The comfort and appeal of family life in rural Devon has certainly played a part in restricting musical output. The clear message from her encounter with Everitt is that we shouldn't expect any new material from Bush anytime soon. "The thing about [the Before The Dawn show] is that most of the material was already written. And to start something like that from scratch is another whole world of work, isn't it? It was an extraordinary thing to be involved in, especially to have got the response that we did. It was really magical. But I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do next."

Bush explained that production of the Before The Dawn album (there are no plans at all for an accompanying video release) has taken up a lot of time, an attention to detail as fastidious as her production of new material to begin with. "​I'm desperate to do something new," she told Everitt, "I've been working on this project for a really long time now. I haven't written a song for ages." And asked if this new release represented a "full stop" to her career, Bush simply replied warmly but vaguely: "Oh no, I don't think so. I think it's just a rather big comma."