Boo Hewerdine
Album: Open
Label: Reveal
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.boohewerdine.net

Boo's latest release, Open, is not actually a set of brand new songs; instead it collects together a host of unreleased recordings made in 2003 during sessions at Britannia Row Studios. Included are early versions of two of Boo's recognised classic songs - Muddy Water and Geography, both here featuring some lovely soft supportive harmony vocals from Rosalie Deighton; these songs, by a neat coincidence, have latterly also appeared on last year's career-spanning retrospective-cum-anthology My Name In The Brackets (and it would be a full six years after these early tryouts before those two songs would appear on the acclaimed God Bless The Pretty Things set), and provide a fascinating comparison and insight into the evolution of these songs.

It's also interesting to hear on Open Boo's delicate acoustic studio recordings of live favourites Name, Rags and Microfilm, and to experience Neill MacColl's deliciously simpatico soupçons of electric guitar and mandolin that enhance three of the cuts. And of course, Open would be a crucial purchase for Boo's fans simply for the chance to have recordings of the remaining half-dozen or so songs that have remained unreleased on any of his official albums.

Each and every one is replete with Boo's trademark simple poetry, gentle reflections on life and love that in another age would have been rightly acclaimed as pop classics yet which have nevertheless sometimes become unavoidably and unjustly lost in the throng of latter-day songwriters on this crowded planet.

David Kidman