In his boppin’, swayin’, finger-clickin’ heyday, serious music scribes had little time for Shakin’ Stevens. Reaching his commercial peak in an innovative era for British pop, he was a throwback to the days when solo singers ruled the charts and a recognisable voice was the passport to success. A rocker with a feel for melody, Stevens was a stylist in the classic mould, able to put a personal stamp on songs old or new, but reviewers were too sniffy to notice. Shaky’s old-school values were considered too safe for him to be recognised as the interesting misfit he really was. The hits kept coming, but critical acclaim never did.
His new album, Re-Set, is the latest in a concerted effort to present himself as an artist capable of creative progress. The first recognised benchmark of this desire “to move on,” as he likes to put it, was the Echoes Of Our Times album from 2016, though distribution and streaming issues meant it was probably not as widely heard as intended (it still made a respectable No 22 on the UK charts). That dark and highly personal effort, mainly built around new songs inspired by research into his family ancestry, was described by Richard Williams (in his Blue Moment blog) as “substantial enough to make posterity significantly modify its judgement of the nature and scale of his talent”.
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Paperback Blighters - The books every record collector should read.
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