Our Troubles End Tonight

I bought the Lucky Jim album Our Troubles End Tonight on a whim. I was wandering around Fopp on Rose Street in Edinburgh one lunchtime in 2004, probably just to get me out of the office at lunch time. It was one of those days that I was in for nothing in particular,  back then and if I'm truthful even now I'm very loathed to leave a record shop without purchasing something. It seems to me to be a bit of a waste of time if you don't at least have something to take home after all that effort of browsing the shelves.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure why I bought this album, it was a new release and Fopp used to have a rack of these with complimentary reviews written next to them which very rarely correlated with the music that you ended up listening to. I do remember when I listened to the album back at my desk in the office I was rather taken a back as it was nothing like I expected to be. It was all acoustic guitar and sounded like a throwback to a time when John Martyn was still a bit of a folkie and his pal Nick Drake was still alive. It's an album full of stuff that certainly sign posted it's influnces , "You're Lovely To Me"  is a kind of lightweight Dylan type thing  which was later picked up and used to sell bread. You could imagine Scott Walker recording  Leah and their is an excruciatingly limp hippy dippy track  Lesbia.  But all told not an unpleasant listen and a cd that I haveplayed more than a couple of times over the years. But certainly not the the sort of thing you would associate with Damien Harris' Skint label which released the album.

The album is certainly worth a listen. I feel sorry for Gordon Grahame as James Blunt has built a successful career and shifted millions of records on a vastly inferior version of this kind of thing.

By far my favourite track is the duet with Heather Banks on The Honeymooners which has echoes of Leonard Cohen and Lee Hazelwood but brings to mind Past, Present and Future by the Shangri-Las to me for some reason.

Lucky Jim - The Honeymooners