Back in the mid-80s, a group of lads from Worcestershire, who’d previously been known as the Cravats, were putting an exceedingly strange spin on the post-punk sounds of the time.
“The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes” and “Mummy You’re a Wreck” may not have earned the Very Things great riches, but they certainly created more than a few ripples among the listeners of John Peel’s radio show and further afield – even encouraging Channel 4 to commission a very peculiar film for The Tube.
Forty years later and vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Robin Dallaway, percussionist Disneytime and guitarist Steven Burrows have reunited and shanghaied Silverlake’s bassist, Tony Sherrad, to share some more of the weird and the wonderful with the listening public of Popworld – and their return is very welcome indeed.
The genre-hopping but cohesive Mr Arc-Eye (Under a Cellophane Sky) is no tribute to past glories but resolutely pushes sonically forwards, while very much retaining the Very Things’ original brain-scrambling grooves, post-punk guitars and esoteric samples from old black and white B-movies and beyond. Dipping into a distinctly eclectic palette of sounds from hard bop, kosmische musik, Northern Soul, sampledelic weirdery and much more, tunes like the feisty but soulful “I Said Yeah” are an emphatic instruction to get on your feet and swing your hips.
It’s far from single speed stuff though and among the many highlights, the distinctly menacing title track comes on like a more tuneful take on the Fall’s or Captain Beefheart’s sound and “I Don’t Know About You” dives deep into psychedelic jazz along with looped and spliced samples of the insane preaching of the Reverend Arthur B Devers. In fact, Mr Arc-Eye (under a Cellophane Sky) marks a most welcome, if unexpected resurrection for the Very Things GXL and it’s to be hoped that it doesn’t prove to be just a one-off.
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