Phil Shaw
A Cheshire market town of 14,000 inhabitants is not a place you would expect to feature in the story of one of psychedelia’s great lost souls.
Yet Pink Floyd performed in Nantwich, at the Civic Hall, in 1967. I know this because Michael Head, commanding the same stage in 2024 with the Red Elastic Band and the exquisite, lysergic-free love song Tout Suite!, told us he was made up to be there, ‘where Syd played’.
Syd Barrett was famously an acid casualty but created an era-defining LP, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and two enduring, stand-alone singles, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. Then, save for some patchy solo work, he was gone.
Mick Head has a rather more extensive catalogue, 11 albums’ worth of beautifully crafted songs, all rendered in his Liverpudlian accent. They stretch from his time fronting The Pale Fountains four decades ago (he affectionately refers to them as ‘The Paleys’), on through the wondrous Strands and Shack, to today’s five-piece band.
His old self-sabotaging habits have led him perilously close to following Barrett, and his more obvious mentor, Arthur Lee of Love, into the afterlife. Twice he kicked heroin only to succumb to alcoholism around the time of the pandemic.
Friends, family and complete strangers helped him survive, revive, and thrive. His rehabilitation has included marrying and embarking upon a fantastically productive writing streak (which will also include an autobiography).
Three fine, redemptive albums, the latest of which is this year’s Loophole, have gone some way towards justifying, or at least explaining, why the New Musical Express proclaimed Head one of our greatest songwriters 25 years ago.
Now nudging 63, he was inspired as a teenager by Teardrop Explodes; the best songs on the Pale Fountains’ 1984 debut, Pacific Street, such as the gorgeous Unless, hint at their psych-synth influence.
Shack produced a slew of killer albums, HMS Fable, Waterpistol and The Corner Of Miles And Gil (the latter released on mega-fan Noel Gallagher’s Sour Mash label). Two stunning songs from Fable, Comedy and Streets Of Kenny, make the Civic Hall set-list pictured below. After the former, a woman shouts: ‘We had that as the first dance at our wedding.’ Head responds with a self-effacing chuckle: ‘Are you still married?’
The rapport with his fanbase is a feature of the show, which was part of the town’s wonderful Words & Music Festival. ‘Still on the wagon, Mick?’ calls one. He smiles and simply says ‘Yeah.’ ‘When’re you going to play Rhyl?’ pleads another, sparking reminiscence about childhood holidays on the North Wales coast.
Someone shouts for something by Love, Shack having backed Lee in the UK during the early Nineties. Again he laughs and says teasingly: ‘You’ll have to encore us up.’
There was no danger of that not happening and the penultimate song of the evening is A House Is Not a Motel, from Forever Changes. With Head’s vast armoury of originals to draw from, a cover version seems almost unforgivable.
Most of the set is drawn from the three Red Elastic Band records, Adiós Señor Pussycat, Dear Scott (album of the year in Mojo and Record Collector magazines) and Loophole.
Several reference booze and its place in his life pre-sobriety. On Ambrosia he sings about ‘Hair of the dog and then a liquid lunch’; on Naturally It’s You we’re asked to picture ‘Tequila on Ice Cream’ ; while on A Richochet Moment it’s ‘Champagne if you’re askin’, pass the paté and a napkin’.
Characters pepper the lyrics as if the album were a soap opera. There’s Shirley, a deceased dancer, on Shirl’s Ghost; the enigmatic Mrs Rafferty on Connemara; philosophical landlord Bert on You’re A Long Time Dead.
One has the feeling, however, that they’re all as ‘real’ as Shakespeare, Mussolini and the Doors, who appear in Merry-Go-Round alongside every Scouser’s favourite Prime Minister (‘Then we all realised, Thatcher’s insane’). Past band-mates of Head’s also have cameos, including his brother John on Ambrosia (‘Bombing down Tottenham Court Road in the morning, Our J lost a shoe on the way’).
Tout Suite!, together with You Smiled At Me and Naturally It’s You, stands apart as a love song. Not the formulaic variety, with easy moon/June rhymes, but achingly tender, highly personal, even vulnerable compositions that resonate because you sense that they are as much reflections of Head’s life as the character-driven capers.
‘Right now, now is the time, to make up your mind, if you, you belong with me,’ he sings plaintively, the word ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ underlining the care Head takes over lyrics.
Fate, chance, serendipity… Head will trust in anything that points to the shared future he craves, even a sugary wafer with a scrap of paper inside. ‘Fortune cookies,’ he asserts at the bridge of the song, ‘have never failed.’
On first hearing the brass that is a prominent element of the Red Elastic Band sound – Forever Changes is clearly the touchstone for Head – sounds mournful. However, the authenticity of the sentiments, framed within a pretty, waltz-like tempo, give the song an uplifting feel.
Michael Head will surely be playing it until the day he stops gigging. Nothing Syd Barrett played at Nantwich Civic Hall can have received a warmer reception. And it’s nailed on for the first dance at weddings. Go ’ead you crazy diamond!
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