— Mark Frith
Nashville. Music City. Home of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw. Home as well to thousands of singer-songwriters, though you'd be hard pressed to find many who were actually born there as well. It is said to be the fastest growing city in the United States and no doubt the bulk of them are gainfully employed in the music business — or they really hope to be.
British music types tend to relocate to either New York or Los Angeles, with a handful migrating back-and-forth between the two. Nashville hasn't taken in a lot of stars from the other side of the Atlantic, Peter Frampton and Robyn Hitchcock being among the notable exceptions, but one who must have seemed destined to wind up there was Siobhan Maher, singer of Liverpool's River City People.
It's worth mentioning where they came from originally because you'd never know it looking at them. Maher is striking with her ocean blue eyes and long, wavy hair but she looks more like a "granola" who hangs out in hip Greenwich Village coffee houses or an associate professor of anthropology at a liberal Colorado university than a Scouse popstrel. Guitarist Tim Speed and bassist Dave Snell both have a distinctly American look to them too, in their case as members of a Boston-area group who I've never heard but who are said to be "deeply influential". Only drummer Paul Speed (Tim's brother) looks like he could handle himself among a pack of football hooligans.
More importantly, River City People sound like they have Americana in their blood. If they'd been from Scotland instead of Merseyside this wouldn't be quite so surprising. Obviously sounding American is as old as British pop itself but to do so while ridding oneself of anything remotely old world is another matter indeed. They looked American and sounded American to the core so was it any wonder at least one of them ended up settling in perhaps the most American of cities?
"(What's Wrong with) Dreaming?" — more like "(What's Wrong with Those) Parentheses?", am I right? — is a rare country-ish number on this blog. Previously, we've come across Rachel Sweet ("I Go to Pieces"), Lone Justice ("Ways to Be Wicked") and The Long Ryders ("Looking for Lewis and Clark"). Not a bad selection, the latter two being particularly good. All three, however, represent Americans trying to buck the system of mainstream country music; this is a bunch of Brits going out of their way to embrace it. I know which side I'd take on that one.
Mark Frith (yet another relative newcomer to ver Hits) looks at River City People as a potentially "great pop group" and doesn't detect any trace of outlaw music in "Dreaming". This may be down to the way UK guitar rock had become much more of a downhome concern, what with acts like Deacon Blue, Del Amitri, Fairground Attraction and Texas all having had success over the previous two years. And Frith is probably more correct than he knows: Garth Brooks was on the ascent in the US in 1990 spelling a boom period of mainstream urban country music that owed at least as much to Andy Williams as it did to Hank Williams. As some within British rock embraced country, American country embraced the pop crossover.
I'm not overly crazy about "Dreaming?" but I will say that it's a marked improvement on their dreadful cover of The Mamas & The Papas' sixties classic "California Dreamin'" which somehow gave them a Top 20 hit earlier that summer. (Yes, someone had the bright idea of releasing a song about how all the "leaves are brown and the sky is grey" and how they went out for a walk on a "winter's day" in June) This is the brief "dodgy" hippie period that Frith is referring to in his review. I was going to write about how they did The Byrds-style 'acid-rock hippie to country purist' transition in record time but for the fact that "Dreaming?" had initially been recorded and released well before their pointless version of "California Dreamin'" so they probably always had country in their blood all along. Hippies? These people??
There's no denying that Maher has a splendid voice that would no doubt come in handy when she finally relocated to Music City. It was an environment that probably suited her better anyway. It would have allowed her to dive right in to country music while still letting her pursue that pop stuff that Frith is concerned about. As for this, I'll take a pass (as did most people considering it only got to number forty). I, too, love pop that makes me feel good about the world, I just don't get any trace of that feeling here. There are songwriters all over the world who better capture it; I daresay there are even quite a few of them in Nashville.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
The Charlatans: "Then"
Groups like The Charlatans didn't seem overly promising back in Madchester's heyday. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays looked to be two of the biggest bands on Earth but they both rapidly fell apart leaving the also-rans especially vulnerable. You'd never know that Tim Burgess and his band of guys whose last names may or may not have been Collins would have been the one baggy act with a future, particularly since "Then" is such a rum follow-up to their memorable breakthrough hit "The Only One I Know". Then again, they were always a frustratingly inconsistent group, always counted upon to follow a total banger with something plodding and filled with Burgess' incomprehensible lyrics. Good they were getting into the swing of having an all-over-the-place discography at such an early stage though.
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