According to the press release, Dee’s latest offering ‘successfully fuses elements of rock, jazz, blues, and Afro-Cuban rhythms’. Well, combine them it does, but the success is a matter for debate. Sure, opening track is slick and croony and has a certain groove, but so has the carpet in my office where I’ve spent hours pacing back and forth listening to terrible albums and wondering how best to deal with them.
I’m not saying that music is a game for young people. I fact, the fact anyone over 30 is considered ancient and past it it commercial terms – at least broadly speaking – is abhorrent, not least of all when artists like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Swans and Neil Young have made great music – arguably some of their best – after they’ve passed into their fifth decade of life. But by the same token, there are people of a certain age who just don’t have ‘it’. Graham Dee’s ‘late blooming’ career could be seen to be on a par with the kind of aspiring literary filks who take up poetry on retirement, and spend endless hours at spoken word nights droning on about flowers in the park or making pithy observations in the style of Pam Ayres. Sometimes, nostalgia is exactly what it used to be, and should be consigned to history.
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Single cut ‘Duckin and Divin’ is the kind of Latin groove number you might have heard played by lounge acts in theme pubs in the 80s, and Dee sings like his teeth don’t fit properly. ‘Emily Nuthin’ comes on like a bad pastiche of Fun Lovin’ Criminals and there are a number of sloppy funk workouts, interspersed with laid-back smoochers that are more loaded with cheese than your Friday night takeaway pizza.
In credit to Dee, he’s played with The Small Faces, Them, The Gass, The Walker Brothers and Pink Floyd, stepping in for Syd Barret on a few live dates in 1967. In short, he’s done some remarkable things. But sometimes, perhaps it is best to dine out on former glories, and it’s hard to see how this inessential set will do anything to enhance his reputation.
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