Lucky Jim

BBC Review
We should be glad that our commercial overlords gave Lucky Jim another chance to sing...
Nickie Latham 2007-05-10
What’s the most regrettable fate that can befall a band? Selling out or selling nowt? Picture the scene - a group of fatcat suits fling coins at the nation’s revered troubadours, shouting 'Dance monkeys dance! That we may sell more reconstituted meat products/hairnets/toilet brushes!' This is not good. However, now picture another scene - your very favourite album lies alone and unloved in an abandoned store-room, the tracks of its tears creating furrows in its accumulated surface dust as it awaits deletion.
A sobering thought, I know you’ll agree, and the fate that appeared to have been marked out for Lucky Jim’s 2004 release Our Troubles End Tonight - despite widespread critical acclaim - before the single “You’re Lovely To Me” was picked up and dusted off by a certain chain of breadmakers, leading to the re-packaging of the album.
For those who missed it first time round, Our Troubles... arguably makes even more sense in the current musical climate than it did on first release. Most bizarre of all, is that the single that’s revived it is, in fact, one of the weakest songs on the album. It’s a pleasant enough, Dylanesque saunter through a sentiment that James Blunt has built a career on, which barely hints at what Gordon Grahame is capable of.
The album’s real strength is found in the arrangements which create an otherworldly quality that is particularly obvious in the title track. Here, soft, sombre synths create a rich psychedelic backdrop to Grahame’s breathy vocal. Elsewhere, on “Leah”, a swirling organ waltz vibrates warmly with a touch of the Scott Walkers as Grahame laments, “Children are wishes that never come true. Even the least of them come to leave you.”
This is an album which doesn’t try to hide its influences and, though mannered in places, it offers enough invention to avoid pastiche. In “The Honeymooners”, a moody duet with Heather Banks, the ghost of Lee Hazelwood lingers behind the lines, but doesn’t undermine it. For this song alone, we should be glad that our commercial overlords gave Lucky Jim another chance to sing in our ears and make some real bread.
- bbc.co.uk

**** You know the priest has started reading the last rites on dance music when the record label best known as home to Fatboy Slim releases... an alt.country record. Cynicism aside, Lucky Jim mark a laudable attempt by Skint to expand their horizons. A two-piece (Scottish lad Gordon Graham and Brighton boy Ben Townsend), Lucky Jim draw on all the necessary and obvious references (Dylan, Gene Clark, Gram). But this collection of border skirmishes is surprisingly effective thanks to a neat line in bruised acoustic melancholia and Gordon's prairie-dog growl. "You're Lovely To Me" is all mandolin, strings and dusty melodies blown in from the desert. "Almeria", a nod of the Stetson to the Spanish city where Leone shot his Dollars trilogy, possesses a ragged, loping gait; a Morricone mooch. "The Honeymooners" sounds like Gainsbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde" for the E generation, while "My Soul Is On Fire" is a fine example of frontier melodrama. - UNCUT Magazine

This engaging slice of British Americana – if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms – was made by Gordon Grahame and Ben Townsend within months of their first meeting in Brighton, an indication of how naturally their talents have meshed here. It's basically an album of Grahame's love songs, embroidered with arrangements that set his acoustic guitar against Townsend's piano counterpoints and string washes – a series of Dylan-esque warbles of devotion that nod to all manner of singer-songwriter legends but teeter over into exaggerated mannerism on only the title track. With its plangent croon and feverish beat, "Leah" recalls Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do", while pizzicato strings and Mediterranean guitar lend an intimate, Leonard Cohen mood to "The Honeymooners", an erotic duet between Grahame and Heather Banks, in which the latter urges, "Come and rest between my thighs/ The hungry days of reason, they have fed you full of lies." Throughout, Grahame displays a neat, original turn of phrase – "Been out on the road with a craving for tar" – and the ability to turn clichés on their head, as in: "One and one is one, not two." But there are discrepancies in some of the arrangements: the sloppily strummed guitar of "Leah" works against the neat, light Brubeck beat; on "Lesbia", the prissy piano sounds out of place. Both tracks would be improved by sparer settings that played to the songs' strengths – as on the lovely "Westwards We're Headed", in which two Spanish guitars and a basic drum machine conjure up the spirit of "Spanish Harlem" - The Independent