Huddersfield/ Leeds alliance BEING 747 made one of 2004's most under-rated albums in "Fun & Games". Full of dead-on, sparky and inventive guitar pop arrangements and topped off by Dave Cooke's wonderfully pithy wordplay (only Vinny Peculiar currently rivals him in the UK underground at present), it was a stonker from start to finish and conspicuously short on filler.
Taken from it, the font-bothering "The Girl Who Fell Asleep Whilst Watching Her Life Flash Before Her Eyes" was always a contender on the singles front. Its' Robyn Hitchcock-style title belies a top-notch power pop attack, with a likeable muscularity replacing the languid "Weathergirl" jangle of yore. It's a gripping tale of narrowly sticking two fingers up at oblivion, with Cooke intoning "the surgeon's knife it cut her, and the gates of heaven closed" while the Morricone brothers strain at the rhythmic leash. Cracking, in simple terms.
The additional tracks assure your ears remain pricked up too. "Communist Prince" could just as easily be a single, and is a daffily marvellous full-blooded anthem, only registering as marginally less mental than the Morricones' other vehicle, the Scaramanga Six, on the seething rock-o-meter. "I'm a knight in Bolshevik armour, like a lone subsistence farmer in a world full of deals", declares Dave drily, putting the 'con' into consumer.
Although actually recorded at home by Cooke, "Desperate Dan" and "Don't Tip Toe" are every bit as affecting in their own offbeat way. The former may be couched in a pastoral, acoustic sensurround, but Cooke's lyric of a typical lonely geezer out on the weekend is all too easy to relate to. "Just a bachelor clown with his tongue upon the floor," observes Dave sadly, before he stumbles out on his long walk home alone.
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"Don't Tip Toe", meanwhile, is a little more quixotic musically, morphing from Being 747's patented, Benny Profane-style jangle at the verses to a revved-up Nirvana-ish scuzz-rock stun when they bring on the chorus. Typically, it's superb lyrically, with Cooke tapping into that all-too familiar, put-it-off-until-tomorrow attitude we all know and love. "I've got three or four other gears....but I'll start late and finish early - what a waste," he laments, sounding like he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, but only too successfully recognising a mentality we're all on breeze-shooting terms with.
That Huddersfield jealously hoards one great local secret in Instant Species still amazes, but that it has a second in Dave Cooke's genius outfit Being 747 seems little short of scandalous. Still, regardless of the commercial outlook, it seems like contemporary Pennine pop is in truly safe hands right now.
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