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Beau
Album: Bonfires Of The Soul
Label: Cherry Red
Tracks: 14
Website: https://www.trevormidgley.com/
Heading into his eighth decade, Christopher John Trevor Midgley shows no signs of slowing down, this being his 20th album for the label in as many years, his musical and lyrical faculties undimmed. An astute political commentator and observer of human nature, while there may not be great deal of variation to the melodies, he's a skilled 12-string guitarist and, a contemporary equivalent of the Shakespearean Fool, his witty and often barbed lyrics laced with sarcasm, irony, humour and humanity.
He opens the latest missive with 'Environment Knight Of The Puritan Woke', a stinging swipe at English cancel culture wars snowflakes who seek to sway public opinion to their own views, proceeding to the thematically linked title track which, addressing intolerant self-appointed guardians of society's standards takes as its spur Henrich Heine's quote "where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people", the flames consuming everything from Noddy to The Bible.
Having addressed the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2023's 'Kingdom Of The Blind', he returns to the subject with 'Incident At Checkpoint One' which draws on an incident in August 2022 at the border checkpoint outside Kherson when a sentry shot and killed the young Ukrainian driver of a pick-up truck while, later in the album 'Motherland' pays tribute to Marina Ovysannikova, a television reporter for Channel One Russia, who, in March 2022, interrupted a broadcast of Vremya to protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine ("When the evening news was being aired/A poster was hoisted she'd prepared/The Motherland was being misled!) You're being lied to!" the placard read").
Set to a circling guitar line, 'My Truth' is a semi-autobiographical tongue in cheek confessional about resenting others basking in the spotlight and success that should have been his but was denied by bias against his Yorkshire origins ("Prejudice ruled unrepressed!/Bigotry was manifest/It seemed all along/My accent as wrong/So my lived experience stressed").
'The March Of Time' offers an allegory of political decline and the winding down of the years in a tale of bandleader's fading glory and a band long past their prime with Handel's 'Zardok The Priest' providing the impetus for 'Zadog The Beast', a nonsense tale of an anthropologist capturing a six-foot creature with green fur, the tail of a poodle and the paws of a lion and human nature's way of ignoring things that can't be explained.
Echoing Private Eye's Sue, Grabbit and Runne, 'Nasty, Brutish & Short' is a brief commercial for a dodgy legal firm, his trademark sardonic wit firing on all cylinders with the amusing 'Lady Chatterley's Brother', a skewering of those who ride the coat tails of famous authors by penning sequels. pastiches or spin-offs to their novels, regardless of quality, here offering up such titles as 'The Joy Of Socks', 'The Budgies Of Madison County' and 'The Porn Birds'.
The subject of several court hearings between April and August 2022, Archie Battersbee was a 12-year-old boy who was found unconscious and subsequently considered to have suffered brainstem death, the case centring around whether or not to withdraw life support, the court eventually ruling to do so. Set to a suitably sober and sparse melody, the poignant 'Upon The Tide Of Time' was written in his memory.
Another true story, 'Smalls Lighthouse' tells of the old lighthouse off the Pembrokeshire coast and the 1801 tragedy when Thomas Griffith, one of its two keepers, died in a freak accident and, scared of being accused of his murder if he discarded the body into the sea, the other, Thomas Howell, put the corpse in a makeshift coffin and lashed it to an outside shelf. However, winds flew blew the box apart, exposing an arm which then would move in the wind as if beckoning.
His wry wit is on fine form for 'Ain't That The Truth', a shaggy dog yarn in which the narrator recounts trying to lighten up proceedings at the funeral of a transvestite friend's lady wife by dressing up and belting out 'I Will Survive'. It doesn't go down well.
It's back to politics for the penultimate 'Enlightenment Song' which calls out image stylists manipulating the perception of public servants ("Your smile's been perfected, your hair is in place/Your language acceptably "street"/Our makeover seems to have gone rather well/Your image, I think, is complete… now get out and bluff with the best").
It ends raising 'The Glass We Knew', a beautiful love song for the aged as the years take their toll and how, while the mirror may reflect the cracks, "even if the colours run/Intimidated by the sun/The glass remains, the glass we knew/With light regardless, shining through". If these are the bonfires of the soul, then the flames should be spread far and wide.
Mike Davies
