Reviews

With it's simple but elegant arrangements - mostly just Peter Blegvad's acoustic guitar underpinned by Danny Thompson or John Greaves bass, with minimal embellishment from producer, Jakko Jakszyk -Choices Under pressure effectively presents the multi-talented musician/cartoonist in the relatively straightforward guise of folk singer. It's a form he inhabits comfortably, not least since the album (subtitled "An Acoustic Retrospective") consists mostly of reinterpretations of songs from Blegvad's Nineties albums - a compilation that skips nimbly from the doting dad's pride and joy in his "Daughter" to the altogether more troubled, Richard, Thompson territory of "Scarred for Life", and the Dylanesque parable "King Strut". What remains constant throughout is Blegvad's philosophic cast of mind, applied to deceptively whimsical reflections on such weighty matters as materialism ("Gold"), time ("Meantime") and religion ("That'll Be Him Now" and "God Doctor"). Most rewarding are his musings on the process of creation, both in "Haiku" - the earliest piece here, originally recorded in 1974 with Slapp Happy - and "Waste of Time", which opens the album with Blegvad quietly shouting down the inner demons that decry his art as pointless (the penalty of being artistic and philosophical): "What are Thruthand Beauty, rescued from the slime?/Nothing but another waste of time." Long may he continue to waste it. The Independent March  9

Peter Blegvad Choices Under Pressure Resurgence
To tie in with The Book of Leviathan(highlights of the comic strip for the Independent on Sunday) comes this offbeat musical retrospective: acoustic reworkings of songs previously recorded with a band. The chosen 10 - ranging frm Slapp Happy's Haiku (originally from 1974) trough King Strut (1990) to 1999'2 Scarred For Life - aren't necessarily his best-known work. But this selection of surreal stories, pointed parables of higher powers and human failings, droll musings and poignant love songs does work well as a set, while newcomers will delight in such intelligent, well-worked economy. Typically, for that Blegvad twist, there are two new electric tracks too, both co-written with XTC's Andy Partridge, of which God Detective is vintage stuff: witty, sardonic and affecting all in one. Par for the course.
Q ****

This is a quick glimpse at the sort of might-have-been that'd get '80s pop-heads sighing.
Kingdom Of Dust - out under the name of cult songwriter/smart-popper Jakko Jakszyk - was salvaged from his collaboration with ex-Japan characters Jansen, Barbieri and Karn (an attempt at an album, regretfully abandoned due to a lack of space in schedules).  For all of the exploratory excellence of the Rain Tree Crow era that's informed JBK's current work, didn't some of you miss the pop glint of the old Japan? "Kingdom Of Dust" might be an answer to those particular prayers, as it draws the trio away from their current ambient-world influences to revisit the '80s. In the process, it coaxes out some of JBK's most memorable, poppy and immediate post-Japan work. The trio's moody and textured music, and the precise yet vulnerable preoccupations of the songwriting Jakko's grafted onto it, lock together as smoothly and silkily as if the four of them had been a band for years. The outcome's something like "Visions Of China" meets an idealistic Steely Dan, with (a whisper of) Stax strut and (whisper it) the impeccable pop craftsmanship of peak-period Level 42. In other words, literate adult pop with more than a sprinkle of luscious art-rock atmosphere, and graced with some cracking tunes as well.  Four blasts, then, of "Jakkopan", in which Jakko's passionate earnestness gets a enigmatic art-gloss makeover. On "The Hands Of Che Guevara" a tale of romance, suspicion and sabotage is explored over brassy, precisely-pointed keyboard blasts, sinuously solid Karn bass, and Jansen's rotating curves of drumming: "Big Wheels In Shanty Town" rubbing up against the more energetic moments of "Innervisions". On "The Judas Kiss" the JBK stylings are more muted: it all comes together as frozen mourning and angry grief, coiling feelings wrapped in an icy light. A slow, wounded but determined walk away from disappointment.   Pop is the trigger here, and pop is the result. "Drowning In My Sleep" steals the crisp, spacious rhythms of swingbeat away from rentabeat R'n'B and mixes them with Barbieri's electronic buzz-sawing and celestial swooshes. Jakko sings nightmares of failed communication - "Drowning in my sleep, every time I try to speak / words go overboard and silence drags me down. / Another dream admits defeat, leaves its wreckage on the reef. / Who wants survivors without language run aground?" - and lets rip with full-throated lyrical guitar. Best of all, there's a lush but quietly heartbreaking ballad, "It's Only The Moon" - a delicate, intimate story of a neglected and suppressed child driven into himself. A slow journey into silence, cool and distant as starlight, with Karn and Jansen's rhythms whispering past like a late-night train.  Four tracks on which Jakko's teaming with JBK is fertile, graceful and inspired. A shame that time and fate didn't allow any more of it. Jimby Walton  Misfit City

Tom Robinson & Jakko M. Jakszyk We Never Had It So Good
The hustling bass and snare riff of the title track announce Tom Robinson's first new studio album in four years-and he's still royally pissed off with the government, the tabloids, social and sexual intolerance, and England in general. The difference is that this collaboration with Polish guitarist Jakko Jakszyk has produced his most polished songwriting since War Baby. There are 10 new songs in all, with a couple (Tomboy and Kiss & Roll Over) co-written by Dan Hartman. The result is a highly personal-and often bleak-view of life in England in the 1990s. Driving Through The Desert sets the scene-a half spoken, half sung journey through a not-so-merry England that compares poorly, argues Robinson, to the England of the '50s he grew up in. The single Blood Brother pursues a favourite theme of an estranged young man, and is supported by a lush Dave Stewart string score. The titles give the rest away-The Baby Rages On, Hard Cases, My Own Sweet Way -and there's a prodigious selection of talent helping out as well including Gavin Harrison, Danny Thompson and Pandit Dinesh from Dizrhythmia, and backing vocals from Sam Brown and Dan Hartman. Rob Beattie - Q Magazine ****

64 Spoons Landing on a Rat Column - Freshly cut records
First, lets get one thing straight. This CD contains some extraordinary songs, some exceptional playing and a thick enough streak of wry inventiveness to make it stand out in anybody's collection. We have to get this out of the way first because this is an album with a story.

Picture a dull Hertfordshire market town in the late seventies. It has a music scene like any other - a whole bunch of individuals in and out of bands: some hoping to play well enough that people might mistake them for the next Pistols. Such was Watford. With one exception: 64 Spoons

Brought up in Watford, 64 Spoons were hard for me to miss. And once I'd seen them I was hooked. They were quite unlike any of the usual hopefuls. The mind-bending musicianship set them apart straight away, but what could prepare you for their flexibility? Just when you thought you had them pinned down, you'd come back from the bar to find that the keyboard player and drummer had swapped places and the bassist was playing flute. Or the laughs? Spoons gigs were FUN. The legendary Palace Theatre show, where they took theatrics to their most ridiculous degree, even flying members of the band around on stage hoists, remains in the memory as one of the finest and most ludicrous shows I've ever seen.

64 Spoons on CD? Even thirteen years too late, it was a momentous event. Frankly, I was scared. How could the music ever live up to my memories of it? And wouldn't it sound dated? I needn't have worried. With the first play it all came flooding back: that delightfully quirky eccentricity, that tendency to flip from the catchily accessible to the ludicrously complex without warning and get away with it, that off-the-wall humour both in the songs and between them, even that joyously silly Hohner Clavinet sound. And dated? Well, at last perhaps the world is ready for a band who combine such bizarre lyrics with the sensitivity of emotional truth and them top them with fluid guitar and trumpet soloing which leaves you open mouthed at their precocity.

Jakko's lyrics seem to combine the best Richard Sinclair tradition of dead-pan silliness ('She's/got to be/forty-three/bugger me/that's old') with the warm-hearted honesty of an Adrian Mole. He may often seem to see the world through adolescent eyes, but this merely enables him better to use humour to point up the awkward truths of everyday life, as in 'The do's and don'ts of path laying', where his tribulations about not making it in a band ('somebody up there hates us') are well matched by a stop-start awkwardness of time changes and cross-rhythms. But for me, Ted Emmett's trumpet is the greatest revelation - at once scorching and moody, his solos access realms of hitherto unforeseen passion and liberate songs like 'Path laying' from their self-imposed earthbound complexity.

In truth, there are no poor numbers on this 17-track CD, although 'This Old Man' and 'Julius Caesar' serve mainly as reminders that 64 Spoons were as much as furious and funny live act as the musicians par excellence revealed here. But 'Tails In The Sky', a much more mature version than on their original single, is the track which stands out. Here, piano, trumpet, guitar and voice combine to such perfection that Jakko's plaintive lament about the well-being of dogs in the afterlife comes to seem almost profound.

'Landing On A Rat Column' is a delightful example of the finest in quirky 'jazz-rock' (horrid term!) and a welcome reminder of what might have been. One critic at the time described 64 Spoons as the 'wrong group at the wrong time'. Now, at last, they are the wrong group at the right time!
Pete Goddard - Facelift magazine 

VOX Magazine 64 Spoons Landing On A Rat Column (Freshly Cut FCR1)
Comedy rock bands. Dearie me. And if that doesn't send you whimpering from the room, how about comedy jazz-rock? Yet it was this lonely furrow that Watford's 64 Spoons ploughed at the end of the 70's. The only evidence of their existence was the single 'Ladies'. This 17 track album, which includes both live and studio material, was released by a one-legged fan who died of a heart attack the day after presenting the band with the finished product. 64 Spoons were that sort of outfit.

Despite the jazz-rock tag - inevitable given their penchant for quirky rhythms and obscure chords- their songs were very tight and melodic. Sweet and memorable English-accented numbers such as 'Five Miles' and Tails in the Sky' made them outcasts from the London pub-rock scene. Eccentricity was prized no more highly then than it is today.

Most of the Spoons moved on to greater things: Jakszyk to Level 42 and Tom Robinson; drummer Lyndon Connah to everything from Bananarama to Thomas Dolby; Trumpeter Ted Emmett to Teardrop explodes and Joan Armatrading; and keyboardsist Tam Neal to The Chippendales (Honestly)
8 ½ out of 10 Peter Douglas

Jakko Mustard Gas & Roses
No, not that Jacko, but the top guitarist with an unpronounceable surname who recently played with Level 42. But hey we'll forgive him that since he has roped in the likes of Danny Thompson, Mick Karn, Richard Barbieri and Sam Brown for his solo debut. Mixing rock, jazz and funk it's a highly polished and often catchy LP. Top track is just another day. 4 out of 5 Teletext

The Road To Ballina
Radio 3's Sunday feature, The Road To Ballina, demanded both ears. This wasn't a programme for washing up to. It was a composition by Jakko M Jakszyk, formerly of the band Level 42, using words as sounds, inflecting them into lines of music woven below. It sampled words, phrases over and over again, as echoes, as motifs.

Feature fans will know the technique, heard more often in Europe these days than here and one which needs both a steady hand and strong heart. Jakszyk proved he had both.

The story was of how Jakszyk discovered he was adopted, of learning about his adopted parents, a French woman married to a Silesian who had served in the German army, of angers and silences between them. They told the microphone their stories. "I wanted a child", echoed from hers onto the music, a refrain, a mantra almost.

His real Mother turned out to have been a singer in Irish bands, beautiful, much loved, mysteriously disappeared. The son traces her to Arkansas, speaks to her over the phone, meets her. Her voice, echoing back into the music, cannot come to terms with her guilt.

This piece spoke beyond particulars, into the universal mysteries of blood ties and family bonds. It wasn't simple, but it was simply beautiful. Gillian Reynolds. The Daily Telegraph

Dizrhythmia
In the 'and now for something completely-different' department we find the eponymously titled album by Dizrhythmia. The nucleus of the band comprises Jakko Jakszyk 9guitars, piano, prophet, flutes and vocals), Gavin Harrison (drums and percussion), Danny Thompson (double Bass) and Pandit Dinesh (Indian drums, percussion and vocals). The line-up is augmented by other British and Indian Musicians.

The music is an involving and respectful merge of western and Indian musical forms, which falls sympathetically on the ear cultivated by British contemporary styles: rock based but with the added dimension of the sophistication of Indian rhythmic figures and that music's unique textural and timbral richness. Jakszyk felt that all previous attempts at a fusion of these diverse musical characters had finished up sounding patronising, a situation he desperately wanted to avoid. I consider that he has achieved this aim rather successfully.

The playing from start top finish is exemplary and that of the Indian classical musicians especially fascinated me. The production and recording is open and clean and provides easy access for the listener to the musicians techniques and styles. And without wishing to detract from anyone else's contributions there is Danny Thompson's magical double bass playing which reliably provides a consistently enjoyable element throughout.

This is one of those records that may take a while to become fully appreciated, it's impact is less immediate tending to insinuate it's way into one's affections at a measured pace. Each time I hear it I find something new to enjoy and everyone I've played it to has, without exception, been intrigued and captivated by it. Hi-Fi Review