MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Loophole MODERN SKY 9/10
Fine dream-state return, with added ghosts. By Pete Paphides
RACK up a few turntable miles with the new album by Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band and it’s tempting to suppose that you’re privy to a period of unprecedented calm in the life of its creator. The truth is slightly more complicated. Calmness is one of Head’s dening characteristics, but the extremes to which he’s gone in order to protect the fertile dreamscape of his creativity have long since become the stu of myth, in particular, his 1998 album The Magical World Of The Strands. His method-style attempt to see the world as Coleridge, Coltrane and The Velvet Underground saw it yielded a masterpiece, but within a few years, the compulsion to score saw him busking in Liverpool City Centre, playing “Scarborough Fair” to quizzical shoppers.
For his loved ones, it must have been a nightmare. Perhaps that’s how it felt for Head too, but curiously – with the possible exception of “Streets Of Kenny” from HMS Fable, the 1999 opus he made with Shack – he has yet to share any songs that suggest that was the case. Even when pondering the sudden absence of his furniture on “X Marks The Spot” from that aforementioned Strands album, what you were hearing amounted to little short of a cosmic shrug. On “Kismet”, taken from his 2022 album Dear Scott, Head recounted another escapade which saw him stranded in the Welsh countryside without any cash or a bed for the night, only to be taken in and fed by a kindly landlord.
If the swiness of Head’s return to action with Loophole – once again with Bill Ryder-jones at the console – suggests there’s plenty of yarns where that came from, conrmation comes not just with its constituent songs but an autobiography. Announced alongside a new song, the Toxteth Tijuana pop of “Ciao, Ciao Bambino”, the book with which it shares its name is due in August. Indeed, you suspect that this album exists as a necessary counterbalance. With the latter a repository for the linear storytelling of a memoir, much of Loophole feels its dream-state counterpart, a place where oating fragments of memory can be fast-fossilised into music.
Dear Scott was an album that ended not with a full stop, but an ellipsis, a pretty piano instrumental called “Shirl’s Ghost”. It’s that same song that opens Loophole,
albeit now fully realised as a dawn sunburst of hazy reminiscences, the eponymous star of the song evicted from the at where the hoarded mementos of her time as a professional dancer cover the oor. As Head’s voice rides the rising wave of strings and trumpets to the outermost point of his register, he beseeches you to believe the paranormal encounter he’s here to report: “Shirl’s ghost/she played for us that day”.
Other ghosts make equally memorable cameos on Loophole. With a woody, autumnal arrangement that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Holdovers’
soundtrack, “Connemara” is another indisputable highlight, Head plucking a path of pure magic through a story that sits somewhere between To Sir, With Love and The Graduate, an obsessive liaison between a lecturer and her ex-student which intensies with the both physical and temporal distance. He writes about his Paleys-era touring escapades as though they were a past life. “Ambrosia” is to Loophole as Van Morrison’s “And It Stoned Me” is to Moondance, oating on a mercury bed of half-memories: “Bombin’ down Tottenham Court Road in the morning/our J lost his shoe on the way”.
On “Coda”, Head’s late bassist and condante Chris “Bi” Mccarey gets a namecheck as the singer intones
“We played this ri in ’93/At the end of Comedy”, but Mccarey’s shadow also extends across “You Smiled At Me”, the latter’s strolling insouciance dating back to when the pair rst saw Roddy Frame playing “Just Like Gold” and neither could gure out what the hell he was playing. Its bones are old then, but Head’s delivery on this unlikely tribute to the Rush-hour crush section of commuter freesheet Metro sees him sounding almost reborn, transmitting from a rareed plane where a single sni on the ozone of adoration takes you beyond the physical realm. That’s also where you’ll nd him on “Tout Suite”, perhaps his most unguarded love song since “Something Like You”, to which this acts as a perfect companion piece.
Somewhat tougher to decode are the lyrical smoke rings of free-associative whimsy that, line by line, billow blissfully out of “Merry-go-round”. “Somebody told me Shakespeare was a fraud/i didn’t know Will Sergeant loves The Doors”, sings Head (the local in-joke presumably being that everyone knows the Bunnymen guitarist loves The Doors). And if “Merry-goround” is Nick Drake’s “Hazey Jane I” by way of Roger Mcgough, “You’re A Long Time Dead” constitutes perhaps the one musical curveball of Loophole. A sketchy shaggy dog tale set to a Dixieland parp concerning a dispute between a tenant, their butcher landlord and a pet-sitting arrangement gone south.
No sense in craving more detail. He’s let his imagination run free all over these songs, and the act of listening will almost certainly do the same to yours. Loophole is the thorough vindication of Michael Head’s belief that no escapade is completely wasted and that no caper is truly futile if it results in a song. And if it results in not just one, but 12 that zz with this sort of low-key joie de vivre, then so much the better. Survivors’ gilt, you might call it.
Head’s let his imagination run free all over these songs