VIVA LA VEGA!
She’s a big star from the Big Apple, and Suzanne Vega’s created a folksy snapshot of her home town
SUZANNE VEGA: An Evening Of New York Songs And Stories (Cooking Vinyl)
Verdict: Touching homage ★★★★✩
DOVES: The Universal Want (EMI)
Verdict: Nostalgia-tinged comeback ★★★✩✩
ROACHFORD: Twice In A Lifetime (BMG)
Verdict: Retro-soul power ★★★✩✩
Suzanne Vega was one of the leading lights of an unlikely folk revival that took off in the late 1980s.
Like Tracy Chapman and Michelle Shocked, she became a star on the back of succinct acoustic songs that provided a stark contrast to the era’s spandex-clad metal and glossy pop.
She never really fitted the fey folky bill, though. a new Yorker since the age of two, she cut her musical teeth in greenwich Village coffee houses and wrote songs steeped in her home town’s downtown grit and uptown glamour. She focused on the details of city life and tackled topics other singers might have considered taboo.
Her experiences are at the heart of a new live album that gathers together songs she has written about the Big apple. Recorded in 2019 at the Cafe Carlyle, an upper east Side club famous for cabaret and jazz, it was originally due out in May as a primer for a summer tour taking in UK festivals.
Those shows sadly bit the dust, so the LP is sneaking out four months later than planned. But, with some of Vega’s UK gigs now rescheduled for February 2021, it makes sense to release it today. as a musical snapshot of Manhattan, it has the authenticity that only a local could bring.
Vega’s sketches are made all the more telling by the fact that she rarely works with co-writers. With one exception — a cover of Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side — all the songs here are credited to her alone, with many of them set in specific spots: Central Park South; Macy’s department store; Tom’s Diner on Broadway; her late half-brother Tim’s downtown apartment.
ECHOES of the city’s glamorous past also abound. Frank and ava is set in the 59th Street residence that was once the turbulent home of Frank Sinatra and ava gardner. new York Is My Destination, from Vega’s one-woman play about novelist Carson McCullers, uses bossa nova beats to wax romantically about the city’s cafe society.
She brings the songs to life with pithy anecdotes. Introducing new York Is a Woman, she explains that the city ‘isn’t always a lady, but she’s always fascinating’. Lou Reed, she recalls, ‘showed me what rock’n’roll was’. On gypsy, she outlines ‘the two great skills’ any girl needs — the ability to sing a folk song and disco dance.
Her three-piece band, led by guitarist gerry Leonard, are tight and unfussy. Luka, a song about child abuse that made Vega an improbable star in 1987, has lost none of its bite. Tombstone, despite its title, is funky and upbeat.
With Vega’s fondness for her home town shining through, this hour-long homily is touching and enjoyable. as she says of Some Journey, a song from her 1985 debut: ‘There are times when you just have to get out of new York . . . even though you’ll always return.’
■ LEAD singer Jimi goodwin describes the first Doves album in 11 years as ‘a prayer to sonics’. He has a point — but not, perhaps, in the way he intended. The universal Want is high on technical details and inventive musicianship but low on the hooks that made the Cheshire trio so vital before they took a break after 2009’s Kingdom Of Rust.
The band — goodwin plus twin brothers andy and Jez Williams — reconvened secretly in 2017 and were writing new material even before fans organised a petition demanding a reunion. They have since worked painstakingly in the studio, and the results will reward patient listeners, even if the melodies lack sharpness. a mood of bittersweet nostalgia prevails. Carousels harks back to childhood holidays, while Prisoners dwells on ‘dusty halls’, ‘hollow shopping malls’ and ‘endless rows of english Roses’. Cathedrals Of The Mind, all shimmering synthetic strings, was inspired by the loss of David Bowie.
The album is dominated by swirling guitars and rumbling bass, but Doves began life as 1990s dance act Sub Sub and there are nods to their past in the driving northern soul of Prisoners.
With the club scene in lockdown for the foreseeable future, there’s something inadvertently eerie about these throwbacks to happier times in celebrated Manchester nightspot The Haçienda.
■ LONDON soul man andrew Roachford has spent much of the past decade as one of the two vocalists in Mike + The Mechanics, the side-project of genesis’s Mike Rutherford. That long spell has introduced him to a fresh audience. But, 2013’s The Beautiful Moment aside, his own career has been put on hold.
The singer and keyboardist, best known for his 1988 hit Cuddly Toy, is now back with a solo album rooted in retro R&B. It hasn’t been a painless return. In 2018, a doctor found lesions on his vocal cords, removed only after a complex operation, and it’s no surprise that survival is one of the themes here.
Mercifully, Roachford’s rich voice is intact. Backed by members of amy Winehouse’s old band, he tackles the album’s Motown homages and melodramatic piano ballads with equal aplomb. He can still belt out a rasping chorus but he knows when to show tender restraint, too.
What We Had, a duet with Beverley Knight, gives this overdue return a compelling centrepiece.