He’s lovely isn’t he? The boy in the beaten-up velvet jacket, the dashing mutton-chops, the combined musical ability of a 32 piece symphony orchestra, the lightly inebriated inconsequence, the delicious melodies? Ed Harcourt turns up at our backdoor again, bottle of chardonnay in one hand, cigarette in the other, a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets From The Portuguese’ stuffed down his ample breeches, and scores of gentle scars on his soul. The rakish collector of weird and wonderful instruments and self-confessed musical whore, doffs his cap, enters politely and proceeds to engage us in all manner of gothic folklore and wise, despairing storytelling. It’s a tale of madness relieved by beauty and bottled in Lewes, East Sussex.
This is Ed Harcourt. Not to be confused with Edward Venables Vernon Harcourt, the charming English clergyman who was Bishop of Carlisle from 1791 to 1807, but Ed Harcourt, great-nephew to Elizabeth David, pre-eminent British cookery writer of the mid 20th century and generally considered responsible for bringing French and Italian cooking into the British home.
Since 2001’s Mercury-Music nominated ‘Here Be Monsters’ Ed Harcourt has been falling in and out of love, wading across half of alpine Europe in search of wild boars, recording with drug-addled American rockers, arsing around U.S. arenas with R.E.M. and Wilco, rapping in karaoke bars and getting beaten up and almost run over by Mexican bandits. And yet this is his fifth album in almost as many years. Prolific? Evidently. Prodigious? Of course. And there’s also no let up in quality.
‘The Beautiful Lie’ is perhaps Harcourt’s most rounded, most focused and most natural work since ‘Here Be Monsters’. The artist himself regards the album as a return to the simplicity and elegance of debut album ‘Maplewood’ and he’s not far wrong. Both albums were, for the most part, recorded straight to eight-track in his grandmother’s house in Sussex, on a piano made for her back in 1917, with the drums set up out in the hallway. The rest was done in East London’s Toe Rag studios, where The White Stripes recorded ‘Elephant’. Graham Coxon lends his maverick handiwork to the chirpy and reviving, ‘Visit From The Dead Dog’ and legendary pedal-steeler, BJ Cole slips in elsewhere. But these are the exceptions in what is an altogether more private, less market-adjusted record than ‘Strangers’. Sure, there’s continuity; the plodding piano, the gentle sway of a chamber orchestra, the muted vocal delivery, the shadowboxing percussion, the sweeping lyrical eloquence and the delightfully twisted subject-matter, but this time it’s that little bit quieter, that bit calmer, with the emphasis and the weight thrown on the stories and the characters fashioned from the ashes of Harcourt’s cigarettes rather than upon the crazy, prodigious ramblings of his trailer-park arrangements. It does have its predictable signature shifting, bone-rattling moments: ‘Scatterbraine’, ‘I Am The Drunk’ – but in the context of more reflective songs like the beautiful ‘You Only Call Me When You’re Drunk’, ‘The Last Cigarette’, ‘Good Friends Are Hard To Find’ and the haunting cobweb and lace romance of ‘Braille’ – featuring a ghostly Hope Sandoval-alike vocal – they provide a curious, lopsided aside to an otherwise graceful drama.
Agony, this is ecstasy. I think you might have met before?