The Dream Academy
Album: The Morning Lasted All Day: A Retrospective
Label: Edsel
Tracks: 24
Website: http:www.thedreamacademy.co.uk

Opening with Life in a Northern Town (where else?), this two-disc reflection on the half-forgotten Dream Academy should do much to force some deserved reappraisal. Easily dismissed at the time as a vehicle for well-heeled, well-connected (he had been a student of Paul Simon), former Tube presenter songwriter Nick Laird-Clowes, there was always a lot more to them than po-faced critics cared to notice.

The first track, a tribute to Nick Drake, laid down a considerable marker that they probably struggled to get over. Produced with bags of empathy by Laird-Clowes' friend, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, the track makes the most of the era's penchant for sophistication (it was 1985) when perhaps more space for it to breathe would have resulted in a song that's easier to live with 25 years down the line.

This is a pretty in-depth appraisal of a band that failed to fulfil their early promise across a three-album career. Period pieces like Girl In a Million (for Edie Sedgewick) and Ballad 4 in 4 are every bit as excruciating as the titles imply, while the cover of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want may be earnest enough but can only detract from the beauty of the original. (A cover of John Lennon's Love, recorded with Poly Styrene late of X-Ray Spex, is similarly hampered by history.)

Indian Summer is an ambitious lost nugget that suggests there could have been better days ahead and there's some measure of intrigue in the unreleased material, not least the vampish widescreen scope of The Last Day of the War, which sounds like a song Marc Almond would once have performed back flips for; and The Chosen Few is an upbeat pop song enlivened by Gilmour's guitar. It all finishes - and finish it should - with a shrug of a new track, Sunrising, that never quite gets out of second gear.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk