Painted Lady

After a decade playing traditional music with melodeon maestro John Spiers, and many years fronting folk big band Bellowhead, Jon Boden is embarking on a solo career with a tour in November. As a reminder of what this prolific, restless artist can achieve on his own, Navigator is re-releasing his debut solo album, ten years after it first appeared.

Painted Lady is a young man's album, a dozen songs of disappointed love, drunken nights, cigarettes, ennui and bewilderment. In ‘Lemany’ he's resentful of a sometime lover (it seems) who keeps coming round, spouting poetry and wasting his time. It takes just one smile, however, to melt his heart. Boden's writing is graphic, his songs peopled with women in trench coats or leather boots and assignations by graveyards. These are the well-wrought expressions of a fraught sensibility. The music is similarly stressed: angular electric guitars, menacing bass lines. Boden marshals an instrumental arsenal: drum machine, Moog, electric piano as well as fiddle, concertina and banjo. It's a rich palate of sounds and he sings with a chansonnier's theatricality, creating atmospheres as densely saturated as Tom Waits’.

This edition has some bonus tracks including, finally, Boden's angst-ridden account of Whitney Houston's ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’.