Keep the Music Live - CD Review

Ken Stott - Keep the Music Live
CD Review by Vincent Raymond-Barker

This album shows Ken Stott at the top of his game, with interesting lyrics and vocals showing increased range, whilst the guitar has moved beyond excellence into timeless beauty. The bishop of Wolverhampton once described Dylan’s ‘Slow Train Coming’ as ‘perfectly balanced’.  The same can be said of ‘Keep the Music Live’. There are songs with messages, songs with laughs, songs of nostalgia and songs which are relevant now.  Making this balanced album even better is the quality of the choruses.  

Enthusiasm is one of Ken’s greatest qualities, as shown in his title track description of a concert in the Lichfield Guild Hall: ‘Such a gig you’d wish for in your dreams.’ The message of the song, support live music, is uncompromising. There is a beautiful and subtle connection between the songs which imperceptibly threads the album together, as at the end of “When Autumn Comes Around”, the single mother by the French marshes hears the murmuring tide before “City by the Sea” begins in a different place and mood, but still near the sea.  I often listen to an album while washing up, but rarely play an album right through. This is such a good album is that I look for more washing up, so that I can carry on listening!  If anybody interrupts with a conversation I shush them…it’s that good. Just one more song, then another; I play the whole album and I hang on every word. As “England, as it used to be” begins, I enjoy the Gibson guitar and wait for Ken to tell me another story. He doesn’t disappoint. ‘I wrote down some lines on the Sunday lunch menu, out in the garden and under a tree…’  While Ken sings appealing stories with clear messages, his mastery of the guitar shows apparently effortless sophistication.  “Borrowed Time”, is at once a celebration of life and a lament at its passing, almost unbearably poignant and with memorable vocal backing.  The messages are far from simplistic.

 A clever link to “Late Night Lisa” comes as the long sleepless nights of “Borrowed Time” segue to Ken in bed listening to late night radio!  All the best albums have a bouncy or comic number, and Lisa has both qualities, as well as the album’s best line: “Why is it that I can only think of you in underwear?” “Jane Austen’s Eyes” is perhaps the album’s finest song, raising questions about that period during the Napoleonic wars.  I was impressed by how convincing Ken is as a gypsy, singing about the Appleby “Horse Fair”. “Take extra care” is a masterpiece of warning clothed in light humour, and an example of how Ken can magic a song from the most unlikely situation. But the underlying question is all the more chillingly effective for the lightness of touch. After such thoughts, it’s comforting to turn to “The River Is Still Rising”, even here when it’s flooding by the Severn near Tewkesbury – almost reassuringly, ‘it does this every year…..rivers are our friends.’ As I enjoy this soft song, remembering rain at a festival, I understand why, as Mick Burrows has pointed out, it would be nice to live in a Ken Stott song. The album’s excellent final track about climate change, “Last Man Out”, is sweet to inhabit. Only as the track finishes does the listener feel Ken’s hand on his shoulder: ‘– and can you close the stable door?’