ALAN PRICE: SHOUTS ACROSS THE STREET (1976)
1) Glass Mountain; 2) The
Waste Land; 3) Leave It All To Me; 4) Hungry For Love; 5) I Know When I've Had
Enough; 6) Shouts Across The Street; 7) I Just Got Love; 8) Don't Stop; 9) The
World's Going Down On Me; 10) Cherie; 11) Don't Try; 12) Farewell Goodbye.
This next record from Alan seems almost
deliberately «low key» and even plain regressive, compared to the vivid
panoramas of provincial British life that he set up on his last three. I mean,
being serious about your native country is fine and dandy, right? But you can't
do it forever; a man needs a break every now and then, and so Shouts Across The Street is a much
lighter and a much less inventive affair. Here, we see Mr. Price falling back
on some good old blues-rock and R&B grooves, as well as retaining his
passion for vaudeville, but throwing out most of the social realism and
replacing it with simpler tales of love, lust, misery, and happiness.
Not that it's bad or anything — «low key» is
fine by me if the grooves are strong and the frontman is attractive, and as
long as Alan is not impersonating Billy Joel or Barry White, he's doing okay.
Unfortunately, he does impersonate
Billy (ʽLeave It All To Meʼ) and Barry (ʽDon't Stopʼ) at least a couple of
times, and these songs just sound like uncomfortable attempts at sounding
«modern» for 1976; ʽDon't Stopʼ is a particularly corny flop, with embarrassing
falsetto "baby, baby, baby"s and a soft-romantic piano-embellished
funk groove that would at least require the presence of a uniquely sexy
vocalist (like Al Greene) before it could even begin fulfilling its pragmatic
purpose (bedding hot chicks). All that's missing here is a gold medallion on a
hairy chest, but we don't even know if Alan had enough hair for the purpose —
and in any case, he always had it better with a bowtie on.
On the other hand, all of the tunes here that
have a more «retro» sound to them work better: even silly-named tracks like
ʽHungry For Loveʼ, with a fun blues-based pop-rock melody and a memorable
guitar line (played on something that sounds very close to 10cc's
"Gizmo" guitar), are acceptable, not to mention happy barroom
shuffles like ʽI Know When I've Had Enoughʼ or lusty romps like ʽThe Waste
Landʼ. On most of these tracks, Alan plays a careless clown, but his vocal and
musical charisma have sure grown since his mid-Sixties singles, and he is now
much less shy and reserved when getting into character, which makes him fairly
convincing when impersonating either the chauvinist gigolo on ʽI Knowʼ or the
midnight stalker on ʽWaste Landʼ (okay, so neither of these set positive social
examples, but it's tough to stay clean all the time).
For something more serious, keep your eyes and
ears on ʽThe World's Going Down On Meʼ, starting out with a chord sequence not
unlike Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ (so you can slap the «epic» label on it
without reservation), but never really diving into the depths of misery:
instead, it tries for an optimistic-sounding chorus that contrasts lyrical
lamentation ("I think the world's going down on me / You can't imagine what
I've seen") with beautiful falsetto resolutions of the chorus melody and a
wall of sound with soaring organs and guitars — works beautifully when you want
to aggrandize your misery and raise it to the status of Universal Tragedy, thus
offering yourself some consolation in the process.
Still, by the time you get to the end, those
final lines of "Farewell, goodbye / I hope I didn't make you cry"
might seem self-ironic — to fans eager for more musical tales of Geordie life
and social allegories, Shouts Across The
Street may well have been a solid disappointment, and, of course, it did
absolutely nothing to revive the man's briefly successful commercial career.
Granted, it may well have been a conscious move away from being stereotyped as
a new «working class hero», but in any case, the deed was done: the album ended
his flirt with fame and fortune once and for all, and from then on, nothing
would help — not even the brief reunion with his former band a year later,
which took place right in the middle of the «punk revolution» and was doomed
from the start anyway. And yet, now that we've left those times far behind and
feel ourselves free to judge musical records based just on their feel-good
quotient rather than their throbbing relevance at the time, Shouts Across The Street does come
across as a fun listening experience on the whole (ʽDon't Stopʼ and an
occasional «cock-rock» misfire like ʽI Just Got Loveʼ aside), and I could
hardly deny it a thumbs up — after all, it's only rock'n'roll and all that.
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