25/10/2024
I received the following review from Mike Davies of the Fatea Record Magazine. It is very comprehensive and a good read. I very much appreciate the time and focus Mike has put into appraising my album. This is well worth the read.
Andy
Reviews
Artist:Andrew J. Newall
Album: My Lucky Charm
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 17
Website: https://www.andrewjnewallwebsite.com/
The soundtrack of a social history musical drama (two episodes currently on his YouTube site) based on the life of Newall's mother Catherine, told to him as she was fighting terminal cancer, the title being the nickname given by her grandmother, with a life that ranges from Donegal to the Orkneys to Dagenham, this is something of a curate's egg. Incorporating spoken passages, the music variously embraces folk, pop and dance and is sung by Newall, Sophie Innes, Frances Murphy, Terry O'Neill and Emma Mitchie.
It begins with the spoken, instrumentally backed, 'Catherine's Introduction' as, narrated in her voice by Rena Newall, she tells of being born in 1940 in Romford Essex, where she lived until she was seven, and being baptised Catherine O'Donnell, but, as the booklet details, the story itself begins in Donegal in 1881 when James O'Donnell and his wife Catherine (Katie) Smith emigrated to Glasgow and subsequently to Hamilton where he got a job in the mines. A series of illnesses and pit accidents eventually left Katie on her own, caring for six children, the first song, 'A Step Away', sung by Murphy, is sort of chill folk with an archive recordings of and speaks of a mother watching their child taking their first steps and pondering the path ahead ("Who knows where each step may take you/A country lane becomes a highway/On this road, through your universe"). Newall on vocals, things move ahead with the jaunty Scottish pop of 'London Is Calling' relating how Katie's son Mick upped stick to move down south to Dagenham in search of work and a better life where he got a job at the Ford Tractor Factory and met and married his boss Fred's typist daughter Betty. WWII comes around with 'The Underground', another instrumental/spoken passage about the sirens and the Blitz, Mick signing up as an anti-aircraft gunner and becoming a lance bombardier. With shuffling skittering beat and singalong melody, 'Grandpa My Hero' is sung by Innes in the voice of Mick's young daughter Catherine, recalling how Fred would take her down to the bomb shelters on his shoulders ("You held my hand that night/Now you have my heart for life/Grandpa you were always there for me/My hero you mean the world to me"). Again with sirens wailing, Newall on vocals, 'The Piper Played' has an appropriately Scottish air to it, the title referring to Operation Pied Piper and the evacuation of children to safer parts of the county, Catherine being sent to Devon and, as with several others, the track being punctuated with spoken narration.
Still during the war, opening with narration and gain sung by Newall, 'The Shores Of Scapa Flow' relates to how it was decided to relocate the Fleet to the Orkneys, Mick being among those sent to guard the vessels, the song, in his voice, about the letters from home and a growing sense of disquiet ("Your letters seem less frequent now despite my pleas for more/Yes, there is something not quite right I know").
Indeed it proved to be the case with Betty leaving and the marriage ending, documented here over three tracks, first in Betty's voice, the others in Mick's, the nervy piano-backed and pizzicato strings of the infectious beats dance track 'Don't Hate Me' ("My heart says we've got to break up/A lie will make it worse") sung by Mitchie, Newall's cascading notes piano ballad 'Let It Go' ("They say it's better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all/This hurt I'm feeling deep inside/It's like a scar that's simply here to stay/My life could have been different/I won't find happiness now dwelling in the past") and the upbeat 80s indie pop feel (The Beautiful South perhaps) of 'On My Feet Again' ("I'm on my own and I will gladly let you know/I'm on my feet again/No longer need to depend/On the likes of you or anyone else/So long I won't be hanging around dear/I'll take this broken heart/With each new dawn a new start").
At this point, Mick's children were being raised by their grandparents, Catherin the only girl in a house full of boys and, as such, getting spoiled by her grandmother. Meanwhile, Mick, decided to take his son, young Micky, to live in Hamilton with Katie, a traumatic experience for the young boy. His mother, unable to cope, asked her son to take him back. Instead he brought Catherine there was well, taking her from Lizzie's back garden and buying ill-fitting new shows and coat before catching a train; it was the last time she saw her adoptive grandmother.
This is captured in two tracks, both featuring narrative, Innes and Newell singing the 80s synth pop 'New Shoes' in the voices of Lizzie ("Don't take my girl. She's all I've got"), Catherine ("You came in through the back gate looking for me") and Mick ("Take my hand girl, quick now/We've a train to catch") while, in similar musical mood, on 'Driving Rain' Innes recounts Catherine's uncomprehending journey to Glasgow ("I want to know how long before you're going to take me home").
It's followed, appropriately by the Latin-flavoured Everything But The Girlsy sway of 'Where Am I' with Innes (Catherine) and Murphy (Lizzie) and some traumatic lyrics ("Where am I? Why have you left me here?/I look around my body wracked with fear/Each face I look at/Glaring eyes Pearce through me/Making me want to flee/How I long for yesterday/To be with friends, to go out and play/To have no worries, no fears/To see my Gran smiling back at me").
With a touch of husky Marianne Faithful, Terry O'Neill sings her only lead on the Caledonian poppy walking rhythm 'All That I Need' which as Katie musing on how different her life had turned out from what she expected and being grateful for the safe return of her four songs from the war. Then Innes returns for the reggae-tinted rhythm of 'Skipping On The Rail Tracks' as Catherine plans to walk the tracks back to London with her brother; rather inevitably they got lost, ate their sandwiches and went back to Katie.
With it clear, the children were never going back, and Mick, now back living at home busy working, Katie decided to buckle down and get their lives in order, starting with them going back to school. leading to my personal favourite, and perhaps the one with the most obvious musical theatre feel (although the underlying echo is 'Paint It Black'), with Innes singing the piano-backed 'The White School' about choosing where she wanted to go ("This school cried out to me/I knew from first I saw it/This school's the place to be/I had no doubt about it.
It ends, Newall on vocals and preceded by the final narration, with the Coldplayish title track celebrating how, at the end of the 1940s, Catherine's arrival had changed Katie's life for the better ("I couldn't wish for more/The day you walked through my door/All of my dreams they came true/A blue ribbon in a ponytail/A young princes from a fairytale/A part of heaven had come down to earth/And I knew that the stars were again shining on me") and she'd become her lucky charm.
Between the songs and the sleeve notes, it's a complicated but involving story of family entanglements, upsets, emotional tugs, separations, heartbreaks and joys, woven together in musical styles that really shouldn't really work together but flow seamlessly, even if the overlaid narration makes standalone airplay difficult. Clearly very personal but universally relatable, I can't help feeling there's a screenplay in waiting there.
Mike Davies
