It's funny how blogging sends you down a musical byway you weren't expecting to travel down. I posted Ooh La La by Ronnie Lane at the end of August. I hadn't been listening to him at that time particularly, but chanced upon the song while skimming through my music folder. Since then I've been going back to a Ronnie Lane compilation I picked up a few years (How Come, a collection of singles and a pair of live tracks, released to raise funds for MS charities at then end of the 90s) and found a cheap Faces compilation (released by the ever reliable Rhino). I'm not a fan of Rod Stewart, and some of the Faces stuff is not to my taste, but Ronnie Lane's songs sound better and better, especially when they pop up amongst and in between other stuff, the sort of stuff you can find here at Bagging Area.
The Poacher was a single (number 36 in the charts) and released in 1974. Recorded with his first Slim Chance band the song and it's parent album Anymore For Anymore mixed rock with folk and country, to make something very English. Trouble is these labels don't really help; it's just a beautiful song.
I pretty much agree with all of that. Rod the Knob rubbing up against Ronnie makes his Faces numbers stand out all the more. The Poacher takes me straight back to the five year old me getting a bowl cut with my brother in a bad Italian barbers. Wonderful. *wipes away a tear, sniffs, goes waistcoat shopping*
ReplyDeleteRonnie was always my fave Face and my fave Faces tracks are the ones he wrote. "The Poacher" is a stunning track, someplace on YouTube there's a brilliant clip of him performing it live on TV.
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