When Crud’s James Berry awarded this Mancunian folk troubadour a three-star rating for his 6-track ‘The Lines’ recording way back in 2003 he drew on comparisons that had already been forced with Badly Drawn Boy and ‘that cunt from Staind’. Well he was wrong, god-bless him. This Mancunian folk troubadour with his loose, fiery brush-strokes, his loping piano and delicate acoustic musings is really that c**t from Scunthorpe. And he’s far from bloody delicate too. Sure, he casts a similar willowy shadow to that straggly Damien Rice with his pared down acoustic balladry and shock of Cohen inspired misery, but ignoring the surface parallels, there’s considerably more dirt underneath the finger-nails, more scars on the face and more snot on the sleeves than any of his contemporaries. You can take the man out of Scunthorpe, but you can’t take Scunthorpe out of the man and in a climate of scummy northern uproar, and gritty social realism, the Scunthorpe man with his broad and uncouth lingo and untidy, foul-mouthed litanies of hopelessness is king. The thinking man’s Arctic Monkeys or their crusty older brother? Certainly worse comparisons have been made, given the dialect and local colour narratives of both.
Put together off the back of a couple of now cult EPs and released in the UK as far back as 2004, ‘Magpie’ sees the shaggy-haired, tough-talking Stephen Fretwell strum and pick his way through a dozen or so songs of rough-knuckle scrapes and cynical observations about love, life and the screwed-up world around him. Recorded at London’s Abbey Road and already certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry, Fretwell and co-producer Guy Massey scarcely stray from the piano, guitar, brushes triumvirate that graced hit-single ‘Emily’ – a style that ends up blossoming into the beautiful, haunting ‘Rose’ and the gravel treading fatigue of its subdued but memorable chorus. And if ‘Rose’ doesn’t goad the tears from your eye, then the pie-eyed inbalances of ‘Lost Without You’ will be like peeling onions. He’s only in his mid-twenties, but he already comes across as a battle-weary veteran notching up tragedies like they’re going out of fashion.
With it’s bony, skeletal designs, it’s minimal arrangements and unapologetic regionalism, Fretwell’s ‘Magpie’ is a bold and impressive debut whatever the criteria. Just easy on those brushes, young man. No generation deserves two David Grays.