What’s in the name on an album? This past week it was announced that the core of the Welsh band Feeder would be returning to the fray as The Renegades, which only goes to show that frontman Grant Nicholas hasn’t heard Randy Newman’s satirical 1979 recording The Story Of A Rock’n’Roll Band. (Or, alternatively, that he has, the joker.)
Familiarity with music of that vintage is the reason that it came as a major disappointment to find that Ellie Goulding is not, as I’d hoped, the daughter of drummer Steve Goulding, whose work features on great songs such as Elvis Costello’s Watching The Detectives, The Associates’ Party Fears Two and The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed, and who has figured in the line-up of such fine bands as Graham Parker’s Rumour, Gang Of Four and The Mekons. Still, at least, Hereford’s Elena Goulding is trading straightforwardly under her own name, while her opposition lines up under misleading aliases. Following Little Boots and La Roux, Marina And The Diamonds refers not to a beat combo but, we are told, to the lady and her fans (you, dear reader, could be a diamond) – and the same is true of Florence And The Machine, which betrays a cynicism almost worthy of Newman.
With their debut albums out within a week of one another, and Goulding’s slight tardiness mitigated by topping BBC and Brits polls, something of a Marina v Ellie squaring-up has been noted elsewhere in the media. While this has yet to reach the status of Blur v Oasis, or a late-night show on E4 involving leotards and mud, it is not as facile as it might perhaps seem. Both young women have had any of their distinctiveness that attracted record-company A&R departments fed through the usual 21st-century pop-music machine, and have been serviced by jobbing songsmiths and synthesiser-literate, drum-programming producers. Goulding’s press biography makes much of how she has been nurtured by Polydor since she was barely able to stand up with a guitar around her slender shoulders, an oft-recycled story chapter that is supposed to rekindle memories of EMI’s fond curating of the nascent talent of Kate Bush, a lady who must be becoming heartily sick of having her personal history evoked.
Add in the obligatory eye-catching turn on Jools Holland’s Later (KT Tunstall’s solo appearance is probably the last time that move actually surprised anyone), and the essence of Ellie starts to trickle through the fingers. Is Goulding her own woman?
And will we care about Lights by the time we’re digging the Christmas ones out of the attic again? In one sense it is a slight offering (for all those years of tending): not much more than half an hour of music, with a few songs (like the current single Starry Eyed) that are gossamer-thin. OK, this is pop music, but it isn’t pop music that is going to stick in the head for long.
On the other hand, though, there is a lighter production touch at work here than on Marina Diamandis’s album, and Goulding’s vocals are much less mannered. On Wish I Stayed, the only track made with early mentor FrankMusik and the only one without a co-writing “assist”, as they say in football reports, she is reminiscent of early Bjork. Every Time You Go suggests Emmy The Great and has some of her best lyrics.
That track, along with the bulk of the disc, has been produced by Finlay Dow-Smith (aka Starsmith). When she sings, in The Writer, “Why don’t you be the artist and make me out of clay?/Why don’t you be the writer and decide the words I say?” is it him that she is addressing?
