Rod Clements
Album: Rendezvous Café
Label: Batsville
Tracks: 26
Website: http://www.rodclements.com

Founder member of the legendary Lindisfarne and writer of some of their most enduring material including the iconic Meet Me On The Corner and Train In G Major, Rod has along the way also enjoyed collaborating with other musicians and many of these have repaid the compliment by covering his songs. His stature has been further enhanced in recent years by dint of a fruitful career as a solo performer in his own right, resulting in him being widely respected as an excellent slide guitar player too.

Following two acclaimed solo albums Stamping Ground and Odd Man Out), Rod has now taken the view that it's high time all his songs were revisited and recorded together in one place, sung as they were originally written, and sung by their author. Rod's popular solo concerts have for a time been the only vehicle for hearing these songs in the stripped-down format, free of the various evolutions, revisions and reinterpretations (some quite radical) that non-solo outings have necessarily embraced over the intervening years since they were written. Audiences have responded very positively to Rod's solo performances, and this handsome new double CD is the result of the demand for a permanent take-home record of these "master's voice" renditions of his songs. Interestingly, almost all of them are receiving their first performance on record sung by their writer. Of the two exceptions, Freedom Square is given in its complete form for the first time (the Promenade cut used an edited version of the lyric), while Sundown Station has hitherto only appeared on the obscure album Leather Launderette that Rod recorded with Bert Jansch in 1988.

But whatever their original context (hit single, album track or live favourite), these songs are consistently well-crafted and positively sparkle with brilliance, and to greet them all at the convivial venue of the Rendezvous Café, presented in a continuous, united sequence that only emphasises their quality and in a thoroughly apt garb of solo (often sensibly multitracked) guitar with occasional double bass accompaniment from regular touring partner Ian Thomson. Production duties are shared between Rod and the admirable Ron Angus: there could be no better candidate for the job than Ron, who has faithfully captured Rod's musical personality at his fabled Durham studio, reproducing the understated ebullience of Rod's instrumental expertise at the service of his song creations, and in ideal balance too. Aural highlights for me in this regard include the fuller settings of Sundown Station and Sunderland Boys, but the more limited of the backdrops all exercise considerable merit in their very restraint. Doubtless there will be some Lindisfarne fans who don't quite take to the stripped-down, less exuberant takes (Meet Me On The Corner itself comes across in a slightly different light, for instance), but me I welcome the chance to re-evaluate the extensive Clements back-catalogue (it's all too easy to temporarily forget how many classic songs Rod's panned), especially in these now-definitive performances. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but there were more than a few songs from the latter-day Mks of Lindisfarne that I'd not even heard before. The sequence over the two well-filled discs is commendably chronological, which accentuates Rod's consistently stylish approach to songwriting - and there's no filler material here.

Presentation of this suitably chunky set is exemplary too, with a great booklet that contains Rod's own personal notes on the individual songs and their background as well as a listing of each song's original appearance on record. This is surely a "can't go wrong" purchase for Rod's many fans.

David Kidman