If a cook at your local restaurant prepared a meal that would only half-cooked and presented it to you on lukewarm platter you’d look at him perplexed. If your favourite football team failed to show up for the second half, chances are you’d reconsider your allegiance to the club. But when a successful and critically favoured artist like Ed Harcourt serves up 28 or so odds and sods of B-Sides, unreleased songs, rudimentary ideas, uneven rarities, rough mixes, rough sketches, spontaneous covers, horseplay and general musical malarkey we approach it with the appreciation of a leper in a glue factory. But let’s go back and qualify that first statement we made. If the cook had happened to be superchef Thomas Keller and your local establishment happened to be the French Laundry in California you may be happy to indulge in whatever scraps you were offered. And if your favourite football team happened to consist of a forward line including Pele, George Best, Diego Maradona and Eric Cantona then you just might forgive them for not making it back for the last forty-five. The truth is, some artists’ throwaway ideas, false starts and musical misdemeanours effortlessly piss on the polished production credits of lesser mortals and the download only release of ‘Elephant’s Graveyard’ for the most part does just that.
Presented in strict chronological order from 2000-2005, allowing every fanatical Harcourt fan the opportunity of charting his career with a fair degree of historical and biographical accuracy, the 28 track release shows the artist keeping himself not only ‘dangerously active’ but operating outside the usual restrictions imposed by industry machinery. Does this mean it’s likely to be full of all the belligerent, overwrought and self-indulgent spores of musical behaviour usually set aside for such projects? Well yes and no really. Every portrait of the artist has its fair share of warts, just as every artistic journey necessitates stops at the urinal and the occasional stop-off for beer and ciggies. But in addition to all the thumb-piano, the scratchy home-recordings, the car noises and the laboured ‘improvisational’ Tom Waitisms there’s an abundance of tender, unadulterated classics in songs like ‘Angels On Your Body’, ‘The Hammer and The Nail’ and the marvellously understated ‘Mysteriously’ – animated all the more for the pared-down, lo-fi production credits and the screwball vocalisation. There are also a couple of commendable covers too; Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’ (performed in the same studio that The Beatles recorded the White Album) and a lush and string-led interpretation of Brian Wilson’s ‘Still I Dream Of It’.
Like I said, one man’s scraps is another man’s Chinese Banquet. Pick up and and enjoy…