Many of you will have made first contact with local folk-heroes Stornoway through their quirky, perky single ‘Zorbing’ (named after that curious, aimless pastime in which a bloke gets into a big ball and rolls around for a bit. I’m not sure if you win points for going the longest time without vomiting, or whether, like virtue, the activity is its own reward), which was recently highlighted for a national audience on the BBC’s Glastonbury shows. It’s a very fine song, but it’s a tribute to this wonderful band that I wouldn’t rank it in the top two thirds of their current repertoire.
The recorded version begins with Brian Briggs’ ardent, thrilling tenor and he is soon joined by a stentorian choir which provides the backdrop for the opening verse and chorus, with a funny, literate lyric dealing with some old student romance- you can almost taste the beans-on-toast and feel the bumpy old sofas of the standard Oxford bedsit. From thereon, there is a new wrinkle: a brief burst of Radio Two-friendly brass before the track heads home, coasting on a pleasant, piano-led groove. It all clocks in at less than three minutes and the whole package is neat, economical, accomplished and tuneful but lacks that transcendent sense of nature-wonder that the best Stornoway tracks boast.
To see what I mean, you only need to listen to the nominal B-side, ‘On the Rocks’, which has the sort of shivery, yearning quality that makes so many of us lovers of the band, rather than mere fans. The song is romantic in the nineteenth century, Blakean sense, rather than the twenty-first century Bullockian sense (apparently ‘The Proposal’ is Sandra’s farewell to rom-com: can we have that in writing?). It is full of tragic, cinematic images of separation, the love object ‘bobbing underneath the bridges, out to the ocean…’ and the music, shimmering, silvery and heavy with love, is unsurpassably lovely. Right lads, that’s enough mucking about in the Somerset mud: can we have that debut album, now, please?