Revolver: CLT comes full circle.

Metroland – Colin Lloyd TuckerSamphire Records EP. March 2019.Tracks: Metroland – The Band Stand in the Bandstand – Bluebird and the Wimpy Bar Kid – Jumping on a Mole.

Described by Colin Lloyd Tucker as ‘a prequel to last years ‘Shire’ E.P.’,Metroland is a welcome and surprising release. Welcome because I enjoyed Shire,surprising as only a few months have past since that first collection was issued.

The repective sleeves offer some clues as to the content within.Shire depicts CLT in a rural setting surrounded by the animals that inhabit the songs. The painting by Peter Rudufo is rich and bold in the classical tradition whereas Metroland is housed behind faded town planner’s drawings with blurred purple train lines criss-crossing the design.C olin illuminates; “With Shire I was writing about my life in the here and now so the imagery and music was very vivid but on Metroland I am singing about a time in the past, growing up in the London suburbs and so with the passage of time my…it was bound to be more impressionistic.”

It is true that there is a nostalgic mist hovering over this new record; distant brass bands, harpsichord waltzes, and ukuleles accompany songs of youth and discovery. Metroland is an area to the north west of London built up in the 1920s and serviced by the Metropolitan railway line. Lloyd Tucker grew up in Harrow at the heart of Metroland in the 1960s/70s.

The title track’s lyric reads like an estate agents blurb, the shiny new station, Art Deco cinema and ‘one wide avenue leads on to another’. Yet somehow CLT manages to sound completely involved as he over emotes every word like an early music hall performer would in order to convey emotion to those in the cheap seats in the days before microphone amplification. Never have the words ‘bay tree, bay window’ been sung with such passion. This is accompanied by a somewhat manic waltz, pleasantly rickety, giving it something of the sound of an old clockwork music box.Colin again; “It did occur to me, in retrospect, that that kind of clockwork-toy vibe goes right back to my first LP Toybox (Plastic Head Records 1982). I was unaware of it as I was doing the song Metroland but of course in my mind I was going back to that time and beyond so maybe, subconsciously the music would manifest that way.”He may be right. The second track on side one of Toybox is Mrs Donovan Jones, a song driven by a strident arpeggiated piano whereas the second track on Metroland is ‘The Band Stand in the Bandstand’, a song that rolls along on the back of a strident arpeggiated …you get the picture. The playing now though is much more refined and the pace more sedate but the songs subject matter is right out of the Toybox era, the idyllic mixed with the sinister, happy high times in the park but who is the unsavoury ‘Mr McKay’ and what has he been up to?’. Colin; “The Band Stand in the Bandstand is about that age when you are no longer a kid but you haven’t fully entered the grown up world either. Maybe going to smoke some hash in the park as it’s hard to do it at home. Those early joints when you can’t stop laughing, some things seem so funny…silly things really.It never actually happened, I just pictured a scenario with a brass band with big tubas and things having to stand up with these heavy instruments as there were no chairs and the music is all going a bit wobbly, that’s the sort of thing that cracks you up even though you feel terribly sorry for them.The Mr McKay character in the song is the kind of older man that would be around the younger kids in the park…probably paedophiles I now realise. You see our house backed on to a park so we would spend a lot of time just hanging out there. Also, I played in a school brass band and a Salvation Army band from the age of about 8 till I was 14ish.”

Next comes ‘Bluebird and the Wimpy Bar Kid’ a familiar tale of young unrequited love sung to a ukulele backing. CLT waits in a Wimpy Bar (England’s first fast food chain) for his ‘Bluebird’ but she doesn’t show…“You know those early, uncomfortable ‘dates’ that don’t work out or go as you had planned…or was it just me? There is no real ‘Bluebird’…it’s made up, like they use to in those old songs.The ukulele was a gift from Paddy Bush, it was the first thing I ever played on it, for the solo I recorded it at half speed so that when you hear it at the normal speed it is very fast and precise.”‘CLTs back catalogue is dotted with songs like ‘Bluebird’, ditties that extrude a gentle humor and ooze an effortless charm. It is a very English tradition and one that was revived in the 1960s by the likes of Ray Davies and Lennon and McCartney. He executes songs in this genre particularly well and in these dark times they are most welcome. In fact I can think of no one who does it better, however some of the humor may be lost on us non-Brits.I asked him about the line ‘I had enough for a Bender and I intended to woo her that way’.“A Wimpy Bender was (and still is) the cheapest thing on a Wimpy Bar menu. Basically it is a grilled frankfurter that had been scored so that it curled into a ring when heated.”No wonder she didn’t show up!

The fuzzy bass riff that starts ‘Jumping on a Mole’ lets you know that the E.P. is going to go out in rock mode. We hear sound effects of train announcements, ‘Stand clear of the doors’, ‘Mind the gap!’.Jumping on a Mole it turns out is nothing to do with hurting the little furry critters, it refers to catching an underground train into London’s West End.“What got me out of suburbia was getting a job in a Soho recording studio when I was 15 but I had been going up there for some years before that. On the tube. On my own. I loved the West End then.I have since read Neil Fraser’s book about Matt (Johnson) and The The that covers in detail my time in Soho and that was weird because I had been thinking about it when I wrote the song”I have never heard anyone say ‘Jumping on a mole’ in reference to catching an Underground train, I think I made it up, but it does sound like one of those Londonisms”The song has a clever coda, a rather accurate Beach Boys parody with a high falsetto voice that Mr Wilson himself would have been proud of.I guess riding the underground at the age of twelve held as much of a thrill for me as riding a wave would have done for a kid in Long Beach, California.

Call me cynical but when an artist announces a sequel or prequel I immediately suspect that they may be trying to pass sub standard material through on the back of something that was a much better work, which is not the case here. The quality of the song writing and the craftsmanship on display result in an excellent product, but is it as good as the mighty Shire? Time will tell but I suspect that this younger sibling will become another much loved piece of Colin Lloyd Tucker’s kaleidoscopic cannon.Jack B. March 2019.My thanks to Colin for answering all my emailed questions so promptly and in good humor.