When you’ve made your living from music for almost four decades, you can feel reasonably confident your audience will follow you wherever you roam.

So it is with Mike Scott, who’s been enjoying a fertile – and profitable – career renaissance in recent years, despite what might be considered a promiscuity of styles.

In just eight years, there’s been poetry (An Appointment With Mr Yeats), rock‘n’roll (Modern Blues), and bedroom loops (Out Of All This Blue), while frequent bouts on the road have provided a ready reminder of his passionate performance qualifications.

Now he manages to combine all these – and more – on his latest. To say he’s a man who can make The Wind In The Willows moving is no understatement: he does so literally, reciting a chapter, ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’, from Kenneth Grahame’s classic to a solemn, touching accompaniment.

He also rocks out fiercely on the title track, punks up a tale of Mick Jones on London Mick, then reins things in on the gentle acoustic In My Time On Earth, adding a wisp of folk to distinguish Then She Made The Lasses-O. As for In My Time On Earth, it’s not far from the peaks he climbed in the mid-90s, with an injection of soul for good measure.

‘Big Music’, in all its forms, remains very much Scott’s.

8/10

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Wyndham Wallace

 

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