RECORDS

Rip It Up, Issue 121, 1 August 1987, Page 28

RECORDS

Tom Verlaine Flashlight Mercury After two years in some sort of artistic obscurity — spent no doubt contemplating modernistic abstractions in some New York attic in Greenwich Village and receiving periodic visits from frail, white, intense heroines bearing rich red wines and the latest French novellas — Tom Verlaine is back. If Byrne is the consummate eccentric then Verlaine is the wraith, phantom perfectionist, a writer and guitarist whose pain and beauty have stretched over six albums and four record companies. With his last two albums, Words from the Front and Cover veering towards a sparser guitar landscape in favour of percussion and keyboards, Flashlight makes a flawless return to the rich, melodic guitar tension that made the two Television albums so enthralling and his first two solo albums so engaging. Few guitarists or songwriters have been able to blend fragile insights

with tough sentiments or storylines as naturally as Verlaine. His blend of narrative and descriptive writing in songs like ‘At 4am’ and ‘Annie's Tellin’ Me' capture a storyline as rich as any Tom Waits song. And when words can be transcended then his guitar speaks heaps as in ‘The Funniest Thing' and the Close Encounters set-up of ‘The Scientist Writes a Letter.’ And just when you thought he couldn’t equal 'Venus' or ‘Days’ for beauty or clarity, ‘Song' blends the best guitar line and sentiment that he's wielded since those heady days. ... Tom Verlaine is back. George Kay Courtenay Pine Journey to the Urge Within Island Over the past year the British media have been according Courtenay Pine the status of a major pop star. Not only is this London saxophonist young, gifted and black, he’s a very snappy dresser and an articulate spokesman for his music. Sort of an English equivalent to Wynton Marsalis. And like Marsalis before him, Pine has packed his debut album replete with ideas and technique, almost as if to justify all the attention. Side two, for

example, opens with the slinky cool of a pop song (and features a lovely vocal from a one-time Supreme). On the next track Pine’s tenor leads an octet in a fiery workout that shows his debt to John Coltrane. From there it's a change to bass clarinet, duetting with a scat vocalist to the solitary support of double bass. Elsewhere on the album Pine makes extensive use of soprano sax as well. At times the album seems more bustled along than deliberately paced. In its 10 tracks—alotonajazz album — Pine not only seems wanting to show the extent of his abilities but also the full range of his technique Wayne Shorter's ‘Delores' is given a straightforward reading but then finished with in three-and-a-half minutes. But there is much to rejoice about on Journey to the Urge Within. After all, too much going on is far preferable to not enough. At 22, Pine is already a prodigious talent with a variety of cleanly executed tones. He is also — that Marsalis factor again — another believer in maintaining jazz as an acoustic music. No synths; no sampling. And if, in regarding himself as a consolidator rather than a re-

volutionary, that means his influences are often evident, it also means he’s developing from an invaluable base. As Courtenay Pine matures, astute jazz listeners will want to stay listening. Peter Thomson World Party Private Revolution Chrysalis Karl Wallinger, the mind in this particular machine, emerged from Wales and spent his apprenticeship with Mike Scott’s Waterboys, a band that mixed bombast with Dylan. Wallinger, like his ex-boss, has obviously rifled through Dylan’s arrangements and book of metaphors to come up with the dry nasal deliveries and images of ‘The Ballad of the Little Man,' and the ’Trouble Down on the Farm' and ‘White Horse’s cliches of ‘Hawaiian Island World.’ Wallinger, complete with beatnik shades and the spoils of materialism on the cover, may be besotted with the spirit of Zimmerman but on ‘Private Revolution’ he creates a nice piece of feet-on-the-ground cynicism, and ‘Ship of Fools’ (despite the blatant plagiarism of two of

Dylan’s favourite characters — the joker and the fool) has a chorus that could move statues; but the winner has to be ‘All Come True,’ a song of easy charm, great tune, and a pointer for Wallinger if he wants to leave Bob, the guru, behind. So, World Party have a hint of potential: Wallinger has over-reacted to the exaggerations of his- involvement with the Waterboys to steal from the past of the world's most credible writer. In the future he shouldn't feel that need. George Kay Jackie Wilson The Classic Jackie Wilson RCA One of the first records I ever owned was Jackie Wilson's ‘Lonely Teardrops,' this scratched 7.” Bruns-, wick that I played non-stop. Something in the way his voice soared with an operatic yelp that got me for life. Jackie Wilson's style owes to the diverse influences of the . Mills Brothers, Al Jolson, Mario Lanza and the black R&B of Billy Ward’s Dominos, who Jackie sang with, replacing Clyde McPhatter. All these influences flow in soulful torrents: this is

what Jackie Wilson said. He talks the blues with ‘Doggin' Around' and 'A Woman, a Lover, a Friend,' deep - Southern soul warmer than fried chicken. As an ex-boxer he could belt the hell out of any song that came his way, the rock and roll of ‘Baby Workout' (which always reminds me of Elvis Presley), the ornate ballads of ‘Am I the Man', and 'You Know What it Means,’ and above all the haunting 'No Pity (in the Naked City).’ . . ■ After the original slew of hits things slowed down until the 1966 Chicago soul comeback with ‘Whispers (Getting Louder)’ and 'I Get the Sweetest Feeling’ that still pack dancefloors and break hearts. Jackie Wilson was one of the world’s most dynamic stage performers, a bewildering array of jumps, splits and twists that influenced both James Brown and Elvis Presley. It was during one of his shows in 1975 that he collapsed and lapsed into a coma, which he never came out of, dying on January 21,1984. I’ve still got that scratched ‘Lonely Teardrops' 7" and will never part with it. Kerry Buchanan