Take Your Time And Take It Slow

Having had two of the second wave of Madchester bands here at Bagging Area in the last week I thought we'd go for a Mcr also-rans hat-trick. The High were made up of two former Stone Roses, guitarist Andy Couzens and drummer Chris Goodwin, with bassist Simon Davies and singer John Matthews. They released an album in 1990, Somewhere Soon, which is a footnote in that period but has a small army of devotees, including me. I've just listened to it in full for the first time in a few years. It's very of it's time, and the vocals and guitars do recall The Roses although they manage to avoid that funky backbeat that dates a lot of records from this point, but it's hard to argue with the quality of half the songs on it- Box Set Go, Somewhere Soon, PWA, the lovely Up And Down, and this one Take Your Time. They followed it with a catchy single, the equally good More..., but the band, the management or the record company were caught rigging the charts and things fell apart. A few years later they followed it with an ill advised second album (Hype), which saw them go rawk, and not in a good way. Listening to it tonight parts of Somewhere Soon transported me back, and I could vividly remember circumstances of playing this song or others on the album, and seeing them live- 'highly derivitive' was the summary of them by someone I went with, but they played these songs well. This is isn't nostalgia for a fresh faced twenty year old version of me, sat in a rented room, playing the 7" of this song bought from Woolworths, my whole life in front of me. This is just a good song by a long forgotten band.

The High - 02 - Take Your Time.mp3