THE MUSICAL BOX

Big Big Train’ new Grand Tour album grabs the top slot this month, plus reviews of Jon Anderson, Bjørn Riis, Daniel Tompkins, Gong, Be-Bop Deluxe, Katatonia, Utopia, Roy Harper, Popol Vuh, Aeon Zen, Deckchair Poets, Earth and more…

Big Big Train’s music has been described as ”pastoral” and “quintessentially English”, and in their case we can probably take that to mean, “Imaginative, subtly nuanced, whimsical at times, imbued with an ineffable sense of yearning, and disposed towards the occasional invigorating blast of pomp and circumstance.” Or something along those lines at least.

And just as the first wave of progressive rock saw UK musicians who had played American blues and soul, or learned classical music, exploring their own roots and making a more personal form of expression, so Big Big Train delved into folk tradition on Folklore (2016) and Grimspound (2017), tilling Albion’s soil and planting some new seeds.

Grand Tour finds the seven-piece band exploring a very different territory, demonstrating that just as in those educational tours of the 17th and 18th centuries, travel broadens the mind. On the brief prelude of Novum Organum, over guitar harmonics and tuned percussion that turn around like an antique mechanism, lead vocalist Dave Longdon notes that they are about to travel to distant lands ‘For science and for art’ and they achieve lift off on the speedy Alive, with its near-pop choruses, on which the ‘White Cliffs of Dover say goodbye/ Sate our urge to see the world’.

As a concept, Big Big Train’s voyage is less a cultural package tour and more a spin through different destinations and points in time, with references to antiquities, historical figures, legends and literature. And without straining the metaphor too far, it’s no coincidence that this album seems more suffused in light than usual and full of colour, like a dazzling afternoon by the Mediterranean.

The first port of call is Leonardo Da Vinci’s Italy on The Florentine, which is an intricate piece arranged with typical deftness. This exploration of ‘The polymath who didn’t fit the paradigm’ grows from breezy guitar strum and

rich vocal harmonies into a fast, gently swinging section with Mellotron rising eerily from the mix and Dave Gregory playing a sweet-toned guitar solo, while Danny Manners’ synth excursion has similarities to some of Peter Bardens’ playing in Camel.

There are other – perhaps inadvertent – nods back to prog’s early days on Roman Stone. It begins with a glittering lattice work of acoustic guitar figures and with Longdon’s voice carrying just a hint of Gabriel-esque grain, it evokes early Genesis, particularly their own voyage into antiquity with The Fountain Of Salamacis, their adaptation of a poem by Ovid. The song lands around the 14-minute mark and like some of their antecedents, Big Big Train have the knack of seeing the bigger picture. The song develops episodically with the group augmented by the

Big Big Train have the knack of seeing the bigger picture.

five members of the Big Big Train Brass Ensemble and an 18-piece string section. And while they deliver complex compositions. they tend to avoid anything too tricksy, but eight minutes in they accelerate into a section with brass chorales shaping the melody and Nick D’Virgilio’s drums running at hyperspeed, before the currents are calmed down once more and the song drifts to its conclusion.

Ariel is an audacious piece that must be the first song to take its listeners to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s cremation on a beach near Viareggio in 1822. The backdrop changes and we are then stuck in stormy weather off the coast of Italy with the titular sprite from Shakespeare’s The Tempest calling on the clouds and the winds to create the shipwreck that strands the crew on Prospero’s isle. It has a hallucinatory quality summed up in the lines, ‘Laudanum plays the poet’s soul like Orpheus’ lyre, Prometheus’ fire’.

And if that might seem to suggest that Grand Tour is over egged to the point of indigestibility, Big Big Train’s lyricists, Longdon and bassist Greg Spawton, are such skilled storytellers that one can only happily suspend disbelief and dive straight into the song’s high drama. It begins with a sea shanty refrain of ‘O, blow the winds, O’ and peaks with a reprise of that theme with Longdon’s voice soaring, boosted by the heft of the full band to thrilling effect. It then ebbs away, becalmed, with Rachel Hall’s elegiac violin, and lone piano notes hanging in reverbed space.

Voyage is another mini-epic of similar length and sums up the album with its metaphor of the trip as existential quest that goes beyond the Pillars Of Hercules – thought in ancient times to be the end of the earth – and off into the void of space.

It’s nice to go travelling, but it’s oh so nice to come home, and so Homesong finds them back in Blighty, fired-up from their travels. After a spectacular finale to the song, powered by D’Virgilio’s bombastic drum fills, we end on familiar turf, as running water and birdsong bring this extraordinary album to a close.