Home Service - Alright Jack
SKU
05-FLEDGLING3015
The Home Service that went into Raezor Studios in Wandsworth in December 1985 to make their third LP was a band with a pedigree second to none in its field of English music. That third LP was Alright Jack and it found the band on a creative streak. At the time of its release critics hailed it as one of the seminal albums in its field, one to rival the best albums that Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, the Albion Band or Richard Thompson had produced. The passage of time has borne out how perceptive those assessments were, for like those other classic albums, it proved more than a 'genre album.' In a quintessentially British tradition Alright Jack proved a classic. They had decided that the album's centrepiece would be a setting of folk songs by Percy Grainger for large wind ensemble. Grainger, a highly complex character with enough quirks and eccentricities to fill the pages of a sizeable psychological study, had been regarded as one of the finest pianists of his day and the preserved evidence in the form of piano-rolls and recordings demonstrates a pianistic virtuosity on an Olympian scale. What is more, he had been a true visionary in the field of folk song collecting, for, in an era when many collectors allowed their preconceptions about the lower classes, good taste and musical orthodoxy to colour and distort their results, Grainger's attitudes were positively revolutionary. For example, other collectors, it would seem, often bowlderized language which might offend or doctored or rejected as aberrations, modes or time signatures which failed to comply with scholarly expectations or theories. [Fledg'ling]