Reviews
Artist:Burbridge & Booth Album: Icons
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: https://www.nickanddan.co.uk
A debut album collaboration between Nick Burbridge of McDermott's 2 Hours fame and fiddle player Dan Booth, a founder member of Ferocious Dog, this, augmented by cello and bouzouki, is acoustic but fiercely performed and politically potent stuff for the times we live in. They kick off with the title track, the chorus "If we pull together/We can tear these figures down/Cast them in the water/and watch the bastards drown" clearly a reference to the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol, the song, which subsequently draws on circus imagery, touching on slavery, religion and the iron masters as touchstones of oppression and exploitation.
Booth's fiddle in forlorn mode, 'Soldier's Heart' is a less strident number but with a more ambiguous lyric that offers both sympathy (the young man in his uniform traumatized by the maimed and dead) and condemnation ("I'm made in shock and violence, I trade in cruelty and rape") for those with such an organ, though there's no ambivalence to the tense but restrained urgency of the five minute 'Cover Me' on which the lyrics embrace hunt saboteurs, miners' strikes, depression, suicide, and prostitution in a call for support and solidarity in standing up against what is wrong in the world as Nick declares "If I've been a fool I've still been a true man".
The traditional folk sounding 'Letter To Abraham' concerns the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the "settlements built on hate" while being careful to underline that it is anti-tyrant and not anti- Semitic, while the musically dynamic rallying cry of 'Living On Thin Air' returns to the theme of socioeconomic inequality where the poor and the disabled are cast as beggars and idle by those who wield the power, again a call to rise up against oppression and injustice ("all we ask is our birthright and till we bring the grey men down we'll struggle, flail and fight") the line "we rise together with a weapon called the word" a nod to The Levellers.
On a more subdued musical note, using the imagery of flotsam and driftwood, 'Beachcombers' is seemingly a love song about staying true and not letting bitterness or resentments sweep you away with the tide. The pace kicks back up on 'Judgement Day', a song about fascists and bigots that, in its character of Flynn, with his tattered coat and stick, weaves a subtle Christ allegory, here not crucified on a cross but falling across the railway track.
Booth's fiddle darts around the swaying rhythm of 'Prisoner' with its persecuted woman and her interrogators and jailers, again the character in the song emblematic of all such abused and tormented for their race, beliefs, politics or whatever. The liveliest track, 'Masque Of Anarchy' sounds another rallying cry to defend, ideally with peaceful protest, but by whatever means are needed, what is right and just and "reach into the light" as it builds to the rousing final line of "we march to the beat of an angel's tread/pledged to the living and the dead/Let all conceived by born".
The more sedate fiddle waltzing, traditional-styled, wintery-hued 'Valediction' once more calls to "hold the line until its end", the album closing with, first a reworking of the McDermotts 2 Hours song about death in police custody, 'Dirty Davey', here now opening with an a capella riff on 'English Country Garden', and finally, the soaring fiddle work of 'Firebird' with a lyric that begins with shooting up to escape from misery to an image of the titular phoenix rising from the ashes as "the fierce light of dawn ascends" and sings that "all things must pass".
Musically, it's a sparse affair, but the duo eke layers of emotion and passion from their guitar and fiddle, just as the songs build on snapshots of despair to find hope and humanity in a common cause and a common heart.
Mike Davies
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