Wexford author and musician Billy Roche came to prominence as frontman with the impishly fiendish Roach Band back in the late 1970s. Now after years spent grazing the long acre of stage and fiction, he returns to first pastures with a very fine solo album.
The opener I’m Gonna Take You Home mixes menace and tenderness, and it’s sung from the standpoint of a guy who wants his woman back. What’s new, you ask, yes indeed. However, the conceit is that he wants to rescue her from the shadowy personage whom she is now linked with as much as for personal gratification. Billy almost spits out lyrics that are laden with a kind of spite:
I hear your toast is burning/They say the coffee’s cold/I hear he lost his yearning/least that’s what I’ve been told.
Signs on it, master Roche, accompanying himself on guitar as ever, has for nigh on 50 years been a spinner of tales that climb up to, or limp back down from a place called heartbreak ridge. He is an artist who in his immortal plays, in the novel Tumbling Down and in his absorbing short stories, Tales from Rainwater Pond, has toyed with plots and side angles to get to a place of disaffection and rueful passion. Or he might have have his protagonist run breakneck as far as he or she can, away from the puddle of muddle and trouble. Sometimes it's an emigrant boat to England that does not move half fast enough.
Listening to the stories here, you sense how the characters could be walking out of of the plays, bit parts maybe slipping out the stage door in search of a fuller characterisation in song.
As for the musical arrangements, the eleven tracks have a decidedly retro feel which is somehow welcome to these ears. One is indeed reminded of Pentangle on I’m Gonna Take You Home, that firmly grounded double bass from Mike Odlum, the onward march and drive of it. A woodpecker tock-tock effect steals in with real point - take a bow percussionist Pete McCamley. Meanwhile Odlum’s tentative harmonium lays a stealthy bed at just the right juncture, not too early, not too late (that Baldwinstown chap never misses a beat, we find.)
The choice of instrumentation throughout shows fresh thinking and an organic ethic that at times is reminiscent of the McGarrigle sisters, or one of those acoustic prog bands we might have heard on John Peel’s Sounds of The Seventies on the BBC around 1972. Aside from the harmonium, glockenspiel, jaw’s harp, flute and Kirsty Moran’s French horn provide the fibre.
Harmonies are carefully layered and used like an extra instrument on quite a few tracks, notably the epic-sounding Doubt which might be viewed as a bracing exercise in existential psychedelia. Lisa Lullaby has striated skeins of music, well-appointed church bells. Roche delivers the song's drony raga with his characteristic breathy rasp, evoking a kind of poisonous dread of the things that can go wrong.
But he can sing softly too. A Place Called You And Me borrows a little from an old ballad tradition, you could easily hear the Johnstons singing it if they were still around. The tender I Dream of You lifts fiercely away from endemic disappointment, desperately seizing the coat-tails of a dream. The song fervently hopes for emotional rescue, much like those forlorn characters who stride out into uncertain futures at the back end of the plays.
Recommended.
