Cyril Tawney
Album: A Man Of Honour
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 14
Website: http://www.talkingelephant.co.uk

Those good guys at Talking Elephant have been undertaking a series of very welcome reissues of recordings by the iconic Cyril Tawney, and luckily this one was at an advanced stage of planning when Cyril's widow Rosemary sadly died just over a year ago. Actually, this time we've a reissue not of an early vinyl LP but instead of one of Cyril's own-label (Neptune) cassettes, originally released in 1997. It collects together "the non-maritime songs" - well, the vast majority of them at any rate.

Man Of Honour's 14 tracks were recorded between November 1995 and June 1997, all but one featuring just Cyril and his signature nylon-strung guitar. The exception is Bitter-Sweet Bed, which, being "no song for a male to sing", is given to Chris While (with Joe While accompanying), who turns in a comparably powerful account to that which she provided for the Albion Band's Acousticity album four years previously. Most of the songs in this collection were written in the 1960s, and cover a multitude of non-naval topics; the best-known are probably On A Monday Morning, In The Sidings, Beacon Park and Plymouth Lament, with There Are No Lights On Our Christmas Tree a welcome seasonal cracker, while several of the others are decidedly obscure and rarely-covered. The jaunty mock-rustic "joviality" Five Foot Flirt dates from 1950 (the closing stage of Cyril's Navy technical apprenticeship), while two songs (If We Did To Their Daughters and the outstandingly poignant Tamar Valley Requiem) were the result of specific commissions at the start of the '70s. The incredibly forlorn Man Of Honour, on the other hand, was written in 1984 but lay in a drawer unused for nine years (aside from its being entered for the 1987 Kendal Songsearch competition, in which it didn't even get shortlisted!), whereas the latest item in the collection, West Yorkshire Lullaby, only just pre-dates this recording.

Cyril's unmistakable singing, his distinctive performing style and delivery, on their own would make these recordings classics, and in any case with their status as "his master's voice" they can be judged definitive, but in many instances these are the only available recordings of these songs and are thus to be doubly treasured. Especially since, with Rosemary's passing, it's now quite probable that no further reissues from Cyril's cassette recordings will see the light of day on CD format, which would be a great pity since Cyril's personal recorded legacy is far too valuable to languish in (unplayable-for-many) cassette oblivion.

David Kidman