Ronnie Lane
Just For A Moment: Music 1973-1997 Pretty much the complete post-Faces Plonk.
Following his departure from the Faces in 1973, Ronnie Lane moved to Wales, throwing himself into the guise of a rural gent fronting a raggle-taggle folk rock band of barley wine drinkers called Slim Chance. Naturally, the Plaistow boy retained his roots; the cover of his first solo album, Anymore For Anymore, showed a couple of cockney coalmen on a horse and cart. Such imagery was already fading out of London life, but Ronnie was both an incurable romantic and a nostalgic, quasispiritual fellow.
Just For A Moment: Music 1973-1997, a six-CD box set of all Lane’s albums (single-CD and double-vinyl versions are also available), complete with hardback book and poster, does him justice, with stacks of previously unreleased material, BBC live sessions, a Rockpalast concert and tracks cut when he moved to America, where he died in 1997 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.
Immediately recognisable classics such as hit single How Come, The Poacher and a retooled Tell Everyone are joined by early examples of his
Passing Show gypsies-on-the-road adventures with a stop-off at the Thames Hotel in Oxfordshire and a gorgeous In Concert version of his heartbreaking song Debris. The title track comes from an obscure Canadian film, Mahoney’s Last Stand, for which Lane and Ronnie Wood provided the soundtrack, including the tantalising I’ll Fly Away and the Dobro driven From The Late To The Early. That standard is maintained throughout Slim Chance and One For The Road. Signs of debilitation do mar See Me (Disc 4), but the Romany traveller’s epic Kuschty Rye still sounds vital. For all his contrary nature, Lane drew kindred spirits into the fold. Gallagher And Lyle, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton fell under his spell, and the persuasive little geezer had the chops to back up his ramshackle Welsh Marches muse. Listening to Around The World (Grow Too Old) or Last Night, you could be breathing the smoke of his campfire. Nonfanatics might want to pass on the live-inTexas-and Japan extracts, but then they’d miss out on a crackling You’re So Rude and a proper knees-up on Ooh La La where his use of the vernacular must have bamboozled our chums across the Pond. ■■■■■■■■ ■■ Max Bell