Beau – Methadone Of Time
Cherry Red Records – 16 April 2021
The new download album by Beau (Trevor Midgley) is cleverly titled The Methadone Of Time, the pain and detox opioid to reduce withdrawal symptoms serving as a metaphor-symbol for our current journey in time if not space. A subject that’s gone viral (in its proper, traditional meaning) with side effects of course. Mostly written during this painful time, it’s fair to say all his work isn’t a banal commentary but brilliantly expands ideas while focusing on trends and events which might escape our notice because they’re too close in the viewfinder.
The 14 songs are dedicated to the memory of a Raider bandmate from the sixties, Paul Marshall, and the co-founder of Dandelion Records during that and the following decade, Clive Selwood. There are echoes of that period’s albums, sometimes quirky and surprising but always ‘on the nail’ regarding chosen topics. Beau has been compared to Dylan, Ochs, Paxton and Lead Belly, yet his singular Englishness has elements of Jake Thackeray, Roy Harper and Kevin Coyne. This poetic troubadour with a limitless 12-string repertoire is a social commentator, a kind of whistleblower of the crotchets and octaves rather than airwaves.
It’s Time To Fight Old Battles sets the scene with a song moved by the tragic death of George Floyd last May in Minneapolis, a fugue-like strum linked by astoundingly appropriate breathless lyrics. Comedy Gold “cries out to be called Lockdown Blues but, the trouble is, it isn’t a blues! It is, however, the longest single sentence I’ve ever written”. Single words at random among the finger-picking delight show the singer-songwriter’s eloquence: cocoon, encapsulate, batten down every last hatch, timeless internees, rust and corrode, distance ourselves in a virtual place / no one encroaches into personal space, consent, submit etc. Funfair [rather than fanfare] For The Common Man derived from George Bernard Shaw’s “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man”. It includes the CD title where all travellers are manipulated and confused as weeds grow where seeds were sown.
We probably all realize now more than ever that medicine, after all, is a trade like any other. How to treat Attitude Sickness which is a widespread but mostly unrecognized disorder? Talking to a doctor, bits of “righteous bigotry” can slip out but help to form the diagnosis as in this amusing, melodic ditty. The Felon is on Youtube now, followed by another amusing tale slightly in the mode of Stackridge, the Bonzo Dog band or silly end-of-news story here extended: Bigfoot McInnes, a true story no less about cannibalism and…corporate solidarity! In the 1960s for almost 40 years was a television programme called Tomorrow’s World that was popular but astoundingly inaccurate we now see. The title is borrowed for a fascinating look at the pre-internet Covid worlds since that documentary started, “in those monochrome days / When tellies behaved in peculiar ways”.
A look at the stage masters of innuendo and double entendres (A Little Something For Your Trouble), when the world didn’t need to be serious, and the heyday of touring family circuses which featured animals and famous clowns as almost the only anarchy to visit sleepy provincial towns in the days when epidemics were foreign. Now even the great clowns have lost their make-up and look like the rest of us (the superb and near five-minute Germ an Measles; got it? Yes, three words). What about that moment when an interviewee misspoke, and the journo jumped on it and them (Slip Of The Tongue)? The melody perks up wittily when the slip is made in this view of got’cha journalism. Media wolves are now egged on by a public baying for blood and revenge. A Self-Made Man has a disclaimer appended (“Any similarities to persons living or dead are of course purely coincidental”) and is a constant Beau theme this century. The person of the title is always well-oiled at the outset by family connections, the boys’ club, old school tie etc. which the media think is a foreign trait (nepotism). It abuts well to a gypsy-like sway’s menacing melody musing when the trickle-down economic theory once existed (Deranged) and the tongue-in-cheek Man Of The People, a singalong commentary noting binge-watching television fixes such as Game Of Thrones or similar pap amid the prophets of hindsight.
One of my favourites is the witty The Middleman, which isn’t about the economy but the polarization of social media. We’re in a thought-policed age when the reasonable and sensible, who see both sides of an argument, are no longer wanted or have no voice because everybody, “Tom, Dick and Harriet”, is so ready (indeed “primed”!) to take offence. As Beau sings elsewhere, “…every third word has to be / the all-pervasive F or C” (Deranged). A truth is delivered hypnotically in a delicious acoustic-folk-adapted riff.
This suite has already charted on Amazon, deservedly so, with sharp pertinent insights about daily general life and now wacky world conveyed through versatile guitar styles. The spotlighted topics are wide at a time when an unfortunate side-effect to social distancing seems to be ‘in yer face’ social/political confrontation. Not only an heir of musical legends already mentioned but a social writer in the line of Peter and Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky (shorn of that American’s academic crust) and Arthur Koestler back to Cobbett, Tom Paine and Swift to Shakespeare’s Feste. In short, a poet-troubadour with a conscience who’s an uplifting panacea for times clearly manifesting malady above the shoulders too. Remedies are unavailable, but certainly an equivalent musical vaccination.