Danny & The Champions Of The World – You Are Not A Stranger Here

‘You Are Not A Stranger Here’ is one of the highest peaks Danny & The Champions Of The World have attained thus far, and simply one of the best records you’ll hear this year.

It’s been a long and eventful seven years since the last Danny & The Champions Of The World studio album, Brilliant Light, and when three years ago, Danny George Wilson released the acclaimed solo album Another Place, it sparked inevitable speculation along the lines of ‘Whither the Champs?’ So it’s beyond pleasing to report You Are Not A Stranger Here finds them very much still with us, recognisably themselves though perhaps only having suffered something of a sea-change.

A key catalyst for that solo record was Danny’s co-purchase of Union Music Store in Lewes. The day-to-day running of a record shop introduced him to new music and people; Another Place’s young producer, Hamish Benjamin, walked through the door one day. Music he’d barely thought of would open new horizons, not insignificantly to Jazz and Japanese ambient music. These fresh enthusiasms came into play as he began addressing a new Champs collection.

In parallel, he’d been pursuing a recurring fascination with place, how we live in it, how we react to its structures, and what buildings do to us, reading Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. This dovetailed appositely with listening to Japanese environmental music (Kankyō Ongaku) and its European fellow travellers, such as Brian Eno and Michael Rother—all grist to a mill and very much rhyming with personal uncertainties and questioning.

You Are Not A Stranger Here marks a turn away from the Champs’ settled status as E Street Band/Passing Show hybrid, presenting a most crafted and considered sequence of songs and interludes incorporating and embracing electronica, ambience, distance, and drift. Wilson and producer/multi-instrumentalist Tom Collison plainly worked closely and of one accord; the ensemble comprised other long-standing Champs Paul Lush, Steve Brooks, Henry Senior, and ‘Free Jazz’ Geoff Widdowson, along with his uncle Lachlan Wilson on saxes, bassist Daniel Hawkins, and the Bennett Brothers. So while familiar faces and familiar sounds remain, they reside in very different settings; Collison wields synthesisers and samplers, layers and marshals found sounds, while Senior takes an E-bow to his lap steel, and Brooks utilises electronic drums.

The striking opener, Talking A Good Game, begins as musique concrète with a ticking clock, the weather forecast, and multiplying sounds of a ripening day, but then the band comes in and Danny’s voice: “I can talk a good game, but I can’t deliver”. The lyric is an extended riff on the aspiration to be profound and the recognition of its likely futility compared to a more humble goal; “I just wanna make you happy/I just wanna share some love/I know it all sounds so simple/But it’s all I’ve got”. `with synth underneath, the E-bowed lap steel, backing vocals gradually become more prominent, and there is some lovely guitar in the backstretch.

Then follows Kicking Tyres, a near nine-minute meander, a theme tune for flâneurs, with leisured piano, guitar, and pedal steel. It’s the experience of being ‘on hold’, an interim when all manner of little things happening ‘off’ half-catch the attention and random thoughts – of Beat Poets and Coltrane – surface. The sound continually shape-shifts until just a hint of, then, the blooming of, Paul Lush channelling David Gilmour in one of the most exquisite pieces of guitar-playing you will hear this or any year.

It melds into the first pair of a quartet of short linking instrumental pieces Collison has created; the metronomic Last Exit hints at motorik while the near-pastoral Every Door You Have Ever Opened gradually transmutes into I’m In Love. Initially showing as a list song, these random items come into focus as pictures, photos, book covers, in a living space, all treasured, but the most significant being “a photograph of us /Standing in the backyard/Of my mother’s house”. Amazing voices are revealed, most notably mezzo-soprano Catherine Parkin.

The repeated iteration of “I’m in love” suggests that the song may be as much about an existential state, an impression only strengthened by Future Past. A co-write with Robin Bennett beginning with just a voice, and what seems a harder and older voice. A stark, contrasting song to the previous, and the lyric “The love that’s around the corner will not be photographed” is not insignificant, neither too the presence in the concluding passages of a mellifluous tenor saxophone.

In Search Of Koji prefigures The Robot Cries, and the song gradually appears out of its prelude, opening and driven by Lachlan Wilson’s alto saxophone; it’s not the first time Danny has employed popular movie archetypes, but these show feet of clay, and looking back to Streets Of Our Times’ Restless Feet – still a live staple – the declaration ‘we’re not going on the run’ is quite the reversal. Then reiterating what this album circles and circles around: “Only the love you share/Still lingers here/Only love undimmed by time”.

The final and appropriately longest interlude is The Poetics Of Space, employing found sound, Lush’s picked guitar, and Lachlan’s restrained alto. It presages the closing Sooner Or Later, which, even on first hearing, is unmistakably stone classic Champs and a potential live tour de force. Though we haven’t left the brave new world, E-bow and sampler are both utilised; it’s an epic summation in which the music gives the lie to the lyric and leaves us trusting, despite all, everything’s going to work out alright.

Gaston Bachelard once wrote: “It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality”, Danny Wilson sings, “we move in doubt”; if this is the fruit of uncertainty, then water that tree! You Are Not A Stranger Here is a complete and finished work in progress, one of the highest peaks the Champs have attained thus far, and simply one of the best records you’ll hear this year.