Anthony Reynolds - British Ballads
Anthony Reynolds is determined to be unpopular and underexposed. Just ask some of his friends like Dot Allison, the folkie who used to do acoustic shows with Pete Doherty, Colin Wilson, the philosopher who wrote a classic of existentialist thought called The Outsider in 1954, or Vashti Bunyan, the ‘godmother of freak folk’ who is directly descended from the author of ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’. Not exactly the Cool Patrol but being relatively unknown anyone to anyone who lives off the TV and radio they are hyper cool for those seeking to publicise they don’t. They all make appearances on this. Reynolds has made songs for each of them but not an album for all of them.
That distance from what’s popular or modern is all about all they share. Dot Allison sings on the first song ‘I Know You Know’ while Reynolds plays piano and sings along. It has soaring strings that never quite go as you would expect, preferring to ascend to one chord when you think they should descend to another. The surprise is always pleasant. Colin Wilson’s turn is reading Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Hill’ over unsettlingly quiet background sounds that double the poem’s effect. Both are beautiful but nothing alike. Like ‘I Know You Know’, ‘Just So You Know’ is lead by the sparse singing and calm backing. Reynolds, Vashti Bunyan and someone called Simon Raymonde make harmonies with a choir that sound like a lament to, well, who knows.
Each of the four songs where he collaborates and the six where he doesn’t tickles a different taste. The acoustics evoke bedsit bohemia land where the only feature on the wall is a bookshelf for at least one worn out book, most likely Wilson’s The Outsider but feeling, the vague sense it gives and lifestyle it evokes, is all that unites it.
This is an album of quiet eccentrics, bookworms who shun the world and people who wear jacket with arm patches and wish the world moved just a little slower to give them time to have black and white pictures taken of themselves sitting in cafes in 1950’s Paris, smoking and discussing the existentialists better known than Wilson like Sartre. Having fancied myself as all of the above at various times, I’m almost as eager to recommend it as the accompanying press release but I can’t think of anyone to recommend it to. It’s an album of a lot things, too many, in fact, to know who it’s an album for.