If you believe parallels can’t be drawn between rock’n’roll and athletics, perhaps you should think again. Athletes and musicians are both frequently drawn to performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals for starters, while the disposability of the music industry could also equate to track and field events. They are, after all, arenas where many can excel at short, sharp sprints, but few sustain marathon-length careers.
Stretching this analogy to breaking point, lots of would be rock’n’roll stars fall at the first hurdle and JAY LEIGHTON could have been one of these. Starting out fronting the hotly-tipped, but short-lived Buffalo 77, he made two singles, the 2009 LP ‘Memento’, toured endlessly and racked up lots of airplay but ultimately had little to show save for a headache after bashing his head against the commercial brick wall.
Apparently terminally frustrated, Leighton broke up the band, sold his guitars and amps and walked away from the music industry. That could well have been where the story ended had he not tuned into the Nick Drake documentary ‘A Skin Too Few’ and got all vibed up again. As a solo artist, he then re-entered the fray, cut the 5-track solo EP ‘Polaroids & Stills’ and then 2011’s sparse, acoustically-inclined debut LP ‘As The Sun Comes Up’.
Leighton’s second LP ‘Hours’, however, is a beast of a very different stripe. Produced by Greg Havers (Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia, Super Furry Animals) and also featuring fellow Manics alumnus Nick Nasmyth on keyboards, plus sympathetic string arrangements from Andy Walters, it’s a far more ambitious outing, aimed straight at the jugular of mainstream pop success.
With Leighton’s yearning, charismatic voice to the fore, the anthemic likes of Don’t Look Back and the widescreen, ‘Everything Must Go’-era Manics drama of the single ‘Wish I Was Springsteen’ dominate. Big issues such as the afterlife (‘Cause & Consequence’) are occasionally put under the microscope, but the most striking of Leighton’s songs (the smouldering, Coldplay-trouncing ‘Too Late To Turn Your Back On Me’, the self-explanatory ‘The Devil & I’) primarily address those universal issues of love and loneliness with sincerity to spare.
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It’s hardly ground-breaking sonically, but it’s well-executed throughout and Leighton divines singular inspiration when he draws from a deep well of personal experience on both the dignified ballad ‘Painting Flowers’ and the finely-wrought ‘Pictures & Memories’: a tender’ n’ emotive portrait of a family funeral framed to near-perfection.
“I am one of the could’ve beens that never was,” Leighton keens during the chorus of ‘Find The One You Love’, perhaps all too deliberately summing up the career he nearly prematurely truncated. Let’s be thankful he resisted the temptation to throw in the towel, then, for with ‘Hours’ he’s not only turned in a personal best but is hitting form that suggests medals may not be beyond his grasp in future.
Jay Leighton online
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