Albums ahoy!

What ghastly times. “Dystopian” doesn't even cover it. Existential anxieties notwithstanding, I've been burying myself in new music. That might sound trite, but it's my release, my escape chamber in normal times, let alone when there’s a genocidal maniac bombing an otherwise peace-loving democracy into the Middle Ages. I know it seems wrong, with that context, to divert your attention to entertainment, but given the topic that dominates every conversation, every minute of television airtime, every Tweet, some relief has to be found.

First up, then, has been a diversion of unbridled guitar rock. That will be the Soho Dukes, a combo formed in the Surrey/Sussex borderlands and whose debut album, Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights, was recorded in Woking, the commuter-belt town best known for raising Paul Weller, the Pizza Express used in a dubious alibi, and where HG Wells’ Martians  landed first in War Of The Worlds before tearing up the place, a chilling foreshadow of events taking place right now in eastern Europe. 

From the outset, the Dukes’ don’t set out to be overly sophisticated, and that’s what works so entertainingly well. Having seen them live, in a small suburban pub where the enjoyably raucous boogie goes down well with a pint, their debut album takes the brakes off. There’s a sumptuous production to it, one that belies its suburban foundations. In fact, it’s a sound that would - I’m genuinely convinced - find a natural home on American rock radio and in truckstop jukeboxes. None more so than opening track Angel Walk, with its superbly polished sax break, and 5,000 Channels, Weekend Millionaire and Murdertown, with the kind of slick shifts of rhythm and lead guitar that wouldn’t be out of place in the canon of any classic rock outfit from the last 50 years. 

There is the odd misstep, such as the comically theatrical Bovver Boys, on which lead singer Johnny Barracuda strays into punkish cod-Cockney, but as Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights progresses, the ears warm to a superbly sophisticated sequence of grown-up guitar rock. For an act that, on paper is - and I hope they won’t mind me saying this - ostensibly a bar band, their recorded debut not only projects polished competence but also the sheer joy of playing this kind of music. Name your band - AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, the Chilli Peppers, even Guns N’ Roses (Barracuda does bear an uncanny vocal similarity to Axl Rose...) - and you get some sense of where the Dukes are pitched musically, but moreover, it’s the degree of professional production and arrangement that makes the album work so well. The Dukes are not new - they’ve been gigging around southern London since the ’90s, honing their stage craft - but in the process, they’ve fine-tuned their songwriting, too, and the net effect of this album underlines it. COVID may have prolonged its production, but it’s been wholeheartedly worth the extra time and effort.

The Soho Dukes play London’s legendary Troubadour on Saturday 7 May - details at SohoDukes.com

Seven years in the making and an incredible 18 years after their last outing, which saw a tentative reunion (or was it reconciliation?) between Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears For Fears have returned with an album that provides the soothing tincture these ears needed as the world winces at the actual shooting war taking place in Europe. And, as an album title, The Tipping Point couldn't have any greater irony, given that the album was released the day after Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. But in spite of that unfortunate timing, the record itself is a consummate pleasurefest, especially for those of my vintage. 

TFF were part of my teenage soundtrack, from the synthpop gloom of Pale Shelter and Mad World to the hits-a-go-go of the Songs From The Big Chair era. What I hadn't always appreciated, until I spoke to Steven Wilson about his surround sound remixes of that blockbuster album and its follow-up, The Seeds Of Love, was just how much Orzabal and Smith had a shared DNA with the progressive rock giants I grew up listening to. It’s what has always made their songwriting multi-layered: considered - epic even, in places (think of a song as topographically expansive as Woman In Chains, for example). 

Like the Soho Dukes’ effort in my previous review, protracted time may have helped Orzabal and Smith create a better product, one of assured songwriting, luscious studio work and perfectly balanced arrangements. That doesn’t mean an overly-slick throwback to the ’80s, but an album of exemplary songcraft. There’s a reflective maturity to it, too - not just the inevitable passing of time, but also Orzabal’s own widowerhood as he came to terms with the tragic 2017 death of his wife Caroline. There are other themes: “We felt the world was very much at a tipping point,” Smith recently told the BBC. “The rise of the right wing, Trump being elected, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, the climate crisis…”. Inevitably, though, the primary source of the album is Orzabal and Smith finding their own relationship again. 

Opening with the understated, Americana-tinged No Small Thing, the nine tracks that follow span the textural range of Tears For Fears records past (with lyrics informed by Orzabal’s mental struggles in mourning). This isn’t, though, a mournful album in sprit - even if the title track’s words are dark, direct references to death, the song’s bouncing rhythm drawing comparison to the similar uplift of Everybody Wants To Rule The World. “The ‘tipping point’ in the title track is a little bit more private and a bit morbid,” Orzabal revealed to the BBC. “The narrator is in a hospital ward looking at someone they've loved for a long time, knowing that they're going to die, watching their breath, looking at them and just wondering at what point are they going to pass from life into death.” Please Be Happy is equally as direct, addressing the alcohol abuse that tragically led to Caroline’s descent into premature dementia, while My Demons - with its semi-intentional Depeche Mode hooks - addresses surveillance society, though it, too could be a bleak appraisal of watching someone succumb to weakness. Gloomy as the lyrical premise of these songs might sound, the actual music itself paints a brighter background, one that ensures the album, from start to finish, is more than just comfort food, but one that warrants repeated listening to unlock the myriad layers encased within. 

The pre-publicity for Johnny Marr’s fourth de facto solo album goes back so far, it seems like I’ve had the release of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 in my calendar for months. In fact, the Mancunian jangler has been  drip-feeding extracts from this ambitious double album since late last year, not that anyone’s appetites needed whetting. 

His previous solo release, Call The Comet was a triumphant exercise in guitar-based, electronic-enhanced indie rock by one of the masters of the art. Even now, I’ll never claim to be a massive fan of The Smiths, but the bits I did like were the result of Marr’s singular guitar playing. It’s a reputation that has quite rightly rendered him the last true British guitar hero. He might not share the blues-rock heritage of veteran axe-swingers like Clapton, Beck, Page and Gilmour, but Marr has what every teenage guitarist yearns for (and never achieves) - a signature sound. That has populated some of my favourite records of the last 40 years, namely The The’s Mind Bomb and Dusk, the 7 Worlds Collide supergroup project, and Electronic’s debut, not to mention a vast catalogue of guest appearances on everything from albums by Roxy Music and Tom Jones to Hans Zimmer’s No Time To Die soundtrack.

Marr is a musician’s musician, and despite the stratospheric adulation he commands - justifiably - lets the music do the talking. Thus, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 represents a whopping hour-and-ten-minutes of mind-blowing electro-rock, cantering between guitar-stomping fare like Night And Day and the epic closer Human, and a more industrial wall of sound, such as The Speed Of Love. There is groove on Tenement Time and the relative bright pop of Counter Clock World. But it is to the most ‘Marr-esque’ songs, like Sensory Street and The Whirl, that bring the energy out of the Mancunian’s spirit most strongly. With such an expansive CV covering four decades, it seems weird to think of Marr as just hitting his stride with his solo career, but Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is an epic product in every sense, and utterly enjoyable for it.

All I want is a cup of coffee and a haircut

Picture: Facebook/Caffe Nero

I've got to that stage in the lockdown when it's become a matter of priorities. I've accepted that, probably, I won't get to see a Mediterranean beach this year and if I was to scale up the scope of disappointments, it's unlikely that I'll be spending any face-to-face quality time with the new colleagues I've only been working with since April. Stir craziness has yet to kick in, largely thanks to now living in a house with a garden, and with the occasional (don't tell my GP) breakout for fresh air and exercise. Last Saturday we ventured into the Surrey Hills and, not to overdo it, it was fantastic: a triple whammy of sunshine, an abundance of green and blue in the colour scheme, and a widescreen view to replace the 4:3 constraint of the living room windows I spend most of the time looking out of.

We've accepted that lockdown is a compromise, and quite a simple one to accept: you stay at home, you don't die. I'm quite down with that. And even if we start to consider creative alternatives to the traditional ten days somewhere relatively exotic, the prospect of caravan park staycations which may have hitherto been sniffed at, all of a sudden look quite attractive. I even spent Sunday drooling over a Sunday Times feature on campervan rentals. A 2-litre Volkswagen T6 California Ocean, with fitted kitchen, rooftop beds and furniture discreetly contained within the door panels, is now looking very viable (for full disclosure, I have also started watching cookery shows and Location, Location, Location, such is the need for escapism).

But to return to my original point, lockdown may have allowed the mind to wander, but clearly not everything is possible. So I've had to pare back my ambition and settle on just two things I need more than anything else to restore order: a decent cup of barista-poured coffee and a haircut. In the case of the former, I recognise that it is somewhat bourgeois. The Nespresso coffee pods we have do the job perfectly well. But thanks to 26 years of Friends repeats, the suggested ambiance of a bare brick-lined Caffè Nero has, tragically, become hard-wired into my needs. And even if pesky medical considerations have forced me to abandon lattes and cappuccinos for the bog-standard Americano (and decaf, too), the absence of an hour's quality time with family or friends, or simply in contemplation solitario, has, I've become creepingly aware, left a massive hole in my life.

Arguably less critical, depending on where you stand on such things, is the haircut. I very wisely visited my preferred barber of three decades just before the lockdown, requesting a neat short back and sides à la Daniel Craig (because, clearly, the current 007 and I share so many physical attributes...). That was in mid-March. It is now almost June. While my Barnet hasn't quite gone the full Castaway, it is now annoying me and my other half, with grey strands I'm normally in denial over poking out like twigs in a garden refuse bag, and a luxuriant mop developing on top that will, soon, resemble one of those awful men's hairdos you used see in pictures on the walls of hairdressing establishments in the 1970s.

So, coffee and a haircut. Not much to ask for. My spiritual cousins in Italy are now emerging from their own lockdown with much the same needs to fulfil, except they have discovered - and this may well be the pattern for us here in the UK - that things have changed. The Times today reports that, amongst a basket of everyday essentials that have received price hikes in Italy, the price of coffee and perfect hair (commodities that actually transcend the term "essential" in Italy ) has gone up, quite a bit. In Rome, an espresso that would have cost Eur 1.10 before the lockdown now costs Eur 1.50, a 40-cent increase that has left Romans horrified. Even worse for the Milanese, where espressos have been hiked as high as two euros. If you didn't know already, the morning shot of black goodness is a quasi-religious ritual in Italy, which is why there is increasing indignation. "We are reporting those cafés to Italy’s anti-trust authority,” Stefano Zerbi of the consumer group Codacons told The Times. "We remember how prices were all rounded up when Italy moved from the lira to the euro in 1999, but this is much worse."

Haircare has seen an even more inflationary increase. Italians venturing out, gingerly, to get their locks trimmed under surgical levels of socially-distanced, PPE-protected hygiene, have been met with bills of Eur 40, a full ten euros more for a cut than before the lockdown. On a more serious note, Italy's hairdressers and myriad coffee bars are typical of the country's small businesses struggling for cash and being driven to Mafia-linked loan sharks. Italy's national anti-loan-sharking association says that complaints from businesses have risen by more than 50 per cent in recent months, another sad indictment of the prevailing influence of organised crime in Italian society.

But while sympathetic to the Italian cause, and not wishing to descend into flippancy, I'm the kind of sucker that would not baulk at price hikes for a sniff of good coffee and a trim. Even if these industries emerge from the coronavirus crisis as black market items, I can easily see myself giving in to my normal principles about contraband in order to satisfy two needs that simply can't be properly fulfilled, either by the gurgling machine in our kitchen, or a brave attempt at self-maintenance by ordering clippers from Amazon.