Phil Martin – Freedom Of The City

Nothing makes the heart sinker faster than a home-made album done by someone with decent talent who produces a solid album of songs that only friends and family will ever listen to, usually just before said musician calls round for tea.

Happily, this is not that album.

Martin is from Whitby and is clearly past the first flush of youth, although – avoiding another bad sign – this is not his first album, so not his lone collection of tunes amassed over a career singing in pubs and small festivals. He’s supported Blur and Tom Robinson, so not all pubs, either.

This is his third solo album and is pleasingly eccentric. The title track opens and it’s a workmanlike tune that seems rooted in the psychedelic pop of the sixties, as he sings about going for the freedom of the city (see cover for how that tuned out).

“Proud” slows it down a little and is a more reflective pop tune (it could be about a battered wife who is too proud to complain though “It took five policemen to hold you down…” suggest she’s maybe proud of how hard her man is so maybe not).

The album takes off with “Children of the Stars”, with a hard snare hit from Mark Huggett (whose drumming is very tight on the opener), some nice sax and Martin showing he has more than you might expect in his toolbox – falsetto, nice guitar and backing singers. “Frost at Midnight” sounds surprisingly like the Pet Shop Boys with a swirling build-up to a dance-floor banger of a chorus, although Martin opts for a downbeat one (Huggett giving all his rack toms a seeing to).

“Glittery Dick” sounds like one of those sixties one-off ballads about lovers crashing on dark corners but it seems to be about what it sounds like, “You’re a big boy” he sings at one point. It’s a decent tune, a loping kind of bluesy shuffle.

“I Never Know (When People are Joking)” should be his signature tune: it opens like the seventies “Ring My Bell” disco classic (boing! boing!), some odd spoken word, then more Pet Shop Boys, a veer into The Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band before, from nowhere, a guitar solo worthy of the Isley Brothers.

“Down The Toilet” appears to be about “toilet venues”, venues like the Sugarmill in Stoke, which really are the only place ever to see a band but which are fast disappearing.

And we’re only half way through. “Gain the World” is decent stab at reggae; “From a Train” more Neil Innes (or John Otway); “Fevertree Towers” leaves the sixties and seventies behind and tries to be a 1930s jazz tune, while “Standing Still All Day” looks at, well, standing about and watching others.

It’s an enjoyable album. The recording may be there or thereabouts, the sound not all that slick – reassuringly DIY – and the genres many and varied but it’s entertaining; I wish I’d had a lyric sheet as they seem intelligent and each tells a little story. For fans of quirky folk / pop and who want something that genuinely does not sound like anything else.
JMC