Review: The Experimental Pop Band
The Tracksuit Trilogy (City Slang)
Simon Budgen finds Davey Woodward still nothing less than Brilliant

Its suggested that I shouldn’t mention The Brilliant Corners in this review. Not because Davey Woodward’s 80s Indie Top 20 stalwarts are any sort of embarrassment, but, I’d imagine, the perky, grinning, unashamed pop of songs you forgot to ignore like Brian Rix, or Teenage would be seen as a poor guide to where his new material lays.

And that’s true enough, musically. The Experimental Pop Band are pop in name alone, and, in fact, as a shifting team of musicians around Woodward’s multi-McCartneyesque talents, only the ‘experimental’ gives them any claim to do what they say on the tin. Recent single Bang Bang You’re Dead offers hints of what to expect. Although nothing else quite lives up to the Angel Corpus Christi stylings of that, there’s a feeling of bass players in cocktail bars – This Mortal Coil goes to the fairground. Playing with percussion and lyrics that capture that scared lazy feeling of reaching midpoint between exam papers and pension books without having managed to acquire a proper relationship or grown-up career path, there are some beautiful, desperate moments here, topped off by Woodward’s fag-cracked voice (imagine Tom Waits after three terms at Chapterhouse. Not that it’s a depressing collection; rather, it’s the point where the gloom lifts; the mug of hot chocolate after a tramp through the sleet.

And its not just a lyrical thread that runs from Corners to Band. You can learn a lot playing Brian Rix next to Casual Sex from the new album; about how teenage sex is illicit, exciting, unexpectedly funny and the better for that, while as soon as you’re not stealing a moment behind your parent’s backs, it becomes little more than a way of killing time; and that the power to do anything can make what you do empty. But Woodward’s past is more than just a timeline of growing on.
It’s no surprise that John Parrish produced this record. While Woodward was in the Corners, Parrish was part of The Chesterfields, who made bright noisy rackets about treehouses and fanzines with puns in them. He then came back to make a dark and aching record with Polly Harvey, the chilling Laos Point, only for people to flap their brainjowls in wonderment that someone so formerly perky should turn out to be able to do haunted as well. "What happened?" they wondered aloud. The point missed, of course, being that Parrish got older; the dedication he once brought to making the perfect pop song found it had other, more complex things to say, and needed new voices to express that. Woodward has gone through the same process, and his earlier incarnation becomes important only in the sense that, say, Martin Amis’s teenage diary would be. The themes are the same, the treatment is imbued with extra depth that only experience can bring. Musically, the Experimental Pop Band has to reflect that. You can’t paint the Brilliant Corners out, because they’re as much part of this record as are Woodward’s relationships and life. The Tracksuit Trilogy offers much more, though: a snapshot on the journey, rather than an over-enthusiastic warm-up.