Postby clive gash » 12 Jul 2017, 23:04
Wow.
Sidewalk Society
Strange Roads
(Fruits de Mer – LP)
It would seem that Fruits de Mer have declared open season on classic albums of an age gone by, at least if recent releases are anything to go by. First there was Kris Gietkowski’s recreation of debuts by Egg, Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster; now comes Sidewalk Society’s re-envisioning of Rolled Gold, the deeply posthumous collection of Action demos and doodahs that appeared back in the mid-1990s, and caught that band at the end of its days.
The Action are no strangers to the Society, of course; they revisited them last year as well, for a couple of tracks on an EP. But some background will not go amiss – the Action were a London R&B band, big with the Mods on the mid-sixties club scene, and big enough with George Martin for him to sign them to Parlophone and produce them too. But five singles between 1965-67 did little, and by the time the Action came to record the demos that made up Rolled Gold, they were faltering. Vocalist Reg King left during the sessions; the tapes were shelved, the band broke up, already forgotten.
But the subsequent rediscovery of both has embedded the band firmly in the firmament of Invasion-era Brit-rockers, and if they never got around to completing what could have been their answer to any of the era’s bigger hitters, then Sidewalk Society have done it for them. With room to spare, as well.
All fourteen of the “album”’s tracks are included, melded to the Action’s own prototypes but in such a way that it’s unquestionably the Society’s own album too. Ideas and possibilities that the demos toyed with are brought to brilliant fruition, and while the band would deny that they ever wanted to “complete” the ghost of Rolled Gold, it’s not hard to reach that conclusion.
The original album is valued for the strength of the songs, and the sense of what might have been. Strange Roads amplifies the first point, and gives a good idea of the second, to emerge a collection that feels as much a part of 1967 (the Who meet the Move on the Small Faces’ allotment) as its parent LP would have.
In a perfect world, Rolled Gold would be up there alongside Smile, the second Barrett-led Floyd LP and a sensible follow-up to Revolver among its era’s most legendary unreleased albums. In this world, Strange Roads eclipses them all.
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.Diamond Dog wrote:...it quite clearly hit the target with you and your nonce...
...a multitude of innuendo and hearsay...
...I'm producing facts here...