I was, for years, a 6 Music devotee in the morning. From the fill of the kettle in the kitchen to the resigned opening of the car door at work, there wasn’t a day between a Monday and a Friday when I didn’t tune in. The music played was almost incidental. It was the chat, the wit, the wisdom that you came for. In (first) Lauren Laveren and (then) Shaun Keaveny – two totally different broadcasters, one serene, the other madcap and unpredictable, but both with the golden touch when it came to breakfast/commuting radio – the BBC had a particular market sewn up. As with everything though, someone somewhere decided things needed freshening up and brought in younger talent.
I suspect, Nick Grimshaw, ex Radio 1 rent-a-gob and the current incumbent in the hot show hot seat is aimed at a listenership in a demographic I no longer occupy, and I’ve happily made peace with this. These days, I use the daily commute to and from work to catch up on Guy Garvey’s Sunday show. The mix of the old and the new, intercut with abstract archive interview clips and Garvey’s laconic northern brogue makes for great in-car listening. When he goes on holiday and a replacement is brought in, that becomes dead annoying. There’s really no substitute for gentle Guy and his loosely themed concept programming.
Speaking of younger talent…
Last weekend, Guy Garvey played Lily Rae Grant‘s Forget About and it fairly floored me. I was stuck at temporary lights, one eye on the clock, foot poised impatiently on the accelerator, but within half a minute, I’d put on the brake and any anxieties I had about getting to work later than normal had vanished, wrapped instead in Grant’s unwinding melody.
I turned it up. Like, right up. Can I suggest you skip to the second track in the player above and do likewise. Why it’s not the lead track is beyond me, tbh. Maybe it’s the six minutes-plus that makes it less likely to get airplay? I dunno – but try telling that to Guy bleedin’ Garvey.
It was the tinkling, descending Riders On The Storm electric piano refrain that reeled me in. I’m a sucker for that sound. That and the Midlake by way of mid ’70s Fleetwood Mac arrangement. The gossamer-light vocals are soaked in delay. They overlap to create counter melodies before wafting off to the outer fringes of the atmosphere. The band behind remain solidly slow and steady. No one is rushing to the finish. Everything is precise and considered. The bass wanders up the frets occasionally, always returning back to the root. A skirl of acoustic guitars briefly colours the palette then steps into the background. The keys are loose and, dare I say it, funky, centering the whole thing, but it’s Grant’s vocals that float around the whole thing like a Stevie Nicks’ lacy stage costume which give the track its air of adult mystery.
Forget About has all the elan and high production of an ABBA deep cut (Eagle, for example) and is all the more amazing when you learn its writer and performer is just 18 years of age. It’ll be interesting to see how Lily Ray Grant develops – I much prefer Forget About to the acoustic introspection of the release’s other track Poison Ivy, so if the budget allows, I’d be hoping to see her on the road with a seasoned gang of Fender bass-wearing, Fender Rhodes-tinkling musos, replicating as much as possible the self-assured storm Grant cooks up on Forget About.
Rather frustratingly, had I heard it ‘live’ at the time, I may well have managed to secure a copy of the 7″ single, but by the time I’d caught up with this segment of the show on Wednesday evening, physical copies had sold out. That’s the power of national airplay right there. You can stick your wares in Spotify’s overflowing cesspit of noise. You can hawk them at 60-capacity gigs. But secure airplay on a radio show with decent coverage and there’s a wee chance you might just make it…whatever ‘making it’ constitutes these days.
You might want to petition Red Licorice Records to do a second run of 7″s. Any more airplay and they’d need to relent, right?
Lily Rae Grant can be found on Bandcamp.
Plain Or Pan 