After spending much of the period 2004-2007 strongly recommending his fantastic body of work, VINNY PECULIAR somehow dropped off W&H’s radar. I can’t really explain why we didn’t seize upon his 2009 release ‘Sometimes I Feel Like A King’ (with The Blue Poppies of Ambrosia), but it’s the only one of the previous seven VP studio albums – and the masterful ‘Whatever Happened to Vinny Peculiar?’ compilation – not to have been given the critical once-over round W&H Towers.
But hey, stuff happens, so there’s no reason why the W&H campaign to have Vinny Peculiar recognised as a national treasure can’t recommence in 2011, especially when the pointedly-titled ‘Other People Like Me’ is yet another compelling and quality-stuffed outing from the man with the lugubrious delivery and highly singular vision of Pop as he thinks it should be.
So who is Vinny Peculiar then? In another life he still occasionally communes with, he’s also been known to answer to the name Alan Wilkes. He’s based in Manchester, but has strong links with both Liverpool and Birmingham and, as one of a cadre of writers who have compared him to the likes of Martin Newell and Jarvis Cocker, I can only concur about his ‘quintessential’ English approach to the off-the-wall Pop gems he fashions at regular intervals. At the time of writing, his enviable back catalogue remains relatively untouched by the masses, but with a CV including collaborations with Bill Drummond, tours with The Killers, Edwyn Collins and British Sea Power under his belt and previous line-ups including three ex-Smiths and members of Aztec Camera and Oasis, his is a remarkable story of DIY perseverance.
So let’s go back to the future. Vinny’s new album ‘Other People Like Me’ was recorded proudly in vintage analogue with long-time producer/ collaborator Rob Ferrier and a band including drummer Neil Carter and bassist John Thirlwall, plus some suitably impressive guest slots. The squalling guitars on the opening ‘My Generation (I Said Goodbye to...)’ are played by former thorn in the side of Britpop, Luke Haines, while the feedback guitars mussing up ‘Art Thief’ are played by ex-Oasis luminary Bonehead.
Many of the album’s themes – adolescent insecurity, voyeurism, misplaced sexuality and middle aged angst – will be familiar to long-time VP acolytes, but this time around ‘Other People Like Me’ seems like a ‘concept’ album of sorts in that several of the songs re-connect with the early 1970s and a world where Glam kings David Bowie and Marc Bolan strutted their stuff on TOTP.
Vinny’s revisited these halcyon times before of course (2004’s ‘Growing up with Vinny Peculiar’ includes a ditty called ‘We Tried to Drown Our Music Teacher in 1974’), but this time he takes a detailed walk down memory lane and summarily stomps on the rose-tinted glasses. Set in 1972, ‘Judy Wood’ tells a gripping tale of loss and alcoholic misadventure (“Judy’s brother died in a boating accident/ her father hit the bottle before he died”) with help from graceful piano, stirring strings and just a hint of Bowie circa ‘Hunky Dory’, even if the lyric perversely references ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ instead
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‘Other People’ and ‘Artrockers’ also take their cue from the Glam era, but ‘Art Thief’ is better still. Fuelled by a ballsy guitar riff, it could be the album’s very own ‘Rebel Rebel’, if it wasn’t tempered by experience, the passage of time and some very witty lyrics (“young guns shoot from the replacement hip”) which only gently bemoan the fact the author won’t see 25 again. Then there’s the inspired ‘My Generation (I Said Goodbye to...).’ With Luke Haines’ abrasive guitar overload picking a fight, Vinny responds with a curious mixture of bile and resignation (“I said goodbye to my generation, I never heard from them again”) and the whole thing ends up sounding like a brilliantly unlikely anthem.
Elsewhere, the autobiographical ‘A Vision’ (“I had my head shaved at the back like Terry Hall in 1984/ I was waiting at the bus stop, heading off to work at the mental hospital”) brings us a little closer to the modern age, while on ‘Square One’, page three stunners, test matches and tangerine underwear (“flashing above the bridge of thighs”) are all on the agenda. The understated ‘Something and Nothing’ seems to bring us slap bang into the present, with Vinny calling a truce with his past (“I showed my children around the old town/ the little things they do make you feel so proud”) and sharing his roots with a newer, maybe less cynical generation. It sounds like a natural conclusion, though there’s still the brief ‘Theme Fifteen’: perfect fare for when the titles go up with a keyboard hymnal gradually rising from the ambience like the organ on Blackpool promenade.
‘Other People Like Me’, then, is yet another collection of suitably eccentric, yet curiously elegant confessionals from one of the UK’s most criminally under-rated talents. It really is high time you made room in your heart for this peculiar, but highly likeable man.
Vinny Peculiar online
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