A Scottish Clearlake? Surely he means a ‘loch’? James Berry laments the passing of the separatist approach for Mull.
There is a fucking chandelier in our line of sight! Actually there are six of them hanging over the whole of this plush interior. There is carpet! White plaster moulds of babies in the buff, clinging for dear life to shields around the upper perimeter of the room! Individually lit sunken wall spots for portrait paintings (!), replaced in this instance by cheap chipboard and ‘no smoking’ signs. This is the industry/fan-club London re-launch for post-post-Britpop hermits Mull Historical Society (there was a similar affair in Glasgow two days previous) and from the moment you haul your deep frozen feet into the main room it just feels wrong. So they brought the weather down with them – London has ground to a halt under a sprinkling of snow, the unrepentant sheet-ice forcing Crud itself to perform some desperate gymnastics on a painful walk here – but they forgot the important parts of the setting.
Remember that first geocentric record – created (you imagined) by a dreamer in a cold wooden shed, sat gazing out across the wide yet containing Mull landscape – essentially a Scottish Clearlake, with shinier signposts? Well, the further you drag a subject from its natural habitat the less it makes sense. Take a fish out of water, introduce it to this kind of banqueting hall set and you expect it to be skinned, keeping the glazed vegetables company, not providing the entertainment. In all honesty they would have been a lot better off round the corner in Shepherd’s Bush Village Hall, audience huddled around a rusty gas heater. Here they end up sounding like little more than dinner music.
But it is just a setting, right? Right. And there are the songs, a couple of old and a lot of new. And despite being eaten up by the surroundings tonight they chime and gleam and smile and wilt like they should, largely. The old, ‘I Tried’ and ‘Barcode Bypass’, raise an eyebrow of recognition and a polite foot-tap (in the circumstances that’s the best we could manage). And the new do what they probably should, the familiar chord progressions, the whimsical lyrics, the expected pace, the clean delivery. Though live was never their forte first time around. But there are moments to remember, or put on hold for the moment at least.
New single ‘The Final Arrears’ limps along averagely and typically, much more memorable are the bright daydreamy ‘Am I Wrong?’, the jumpy ‘Gravity’ and the floaty ‘Asylum’. He appears to have gone from considering sheep-love on the first album (‘I Tried’) to waking up with an MP (‘Minister For Genetics And Insurance MP’), so maybe he has just moved on and we’ll have to lump it with our back-of-beyond nostalgia. Maybe this is where he wants to be now. Maybe he’s not been back to Mull since he tasted the sweet filth of the mainland. But if there’s one thing that made him stand separate from the rest, made his fey indie that touch tastier to the palette, it was that separation. Maybe he should go back for a holiday before we see him next.