The Fall co-founder, Una Baines, launched the debut album of her band, Poppycock, at the Carlton Club in Whalley Range this week. The album, Magic Mothers has been over a decade in the making and features kaleidoscopic artwork by The Fall record cover artist Pascal le Gras, and contributions from former Fall member, Simon Wolstencroft, and Howard Jones from The Blue Orchids, another of Una’s ex bands.
Magic Mothers features nine stylish tracks ranging through bluesy, jazzy, 21st Century folky, Euro, even South American blended haunting vibes, with an array of gentle female vocalists soothing personal, planetary and feminist lyrics on tracks like Gaslighting (‘We’re gonna stop you/ from taking the pleasure/out of our lives’), Hel (‘What’s happening to the air/What’s happening to the sea/What’s happening to our world/What’s happening to you and me?) and the more rocky, agitated and anthemic Magic Mothers (‘I am a feminista. I am your sacred sister. No means No! Stop means Stop!’).
The Alevai Jewish Women’s Group, which made a film with Nigel Pivaro and a North Manchester Yiddish Dictionary for the Bury New Road project, feature on the funky, trumpety, Latin tinged track, Iron Age Dance, in which a towering babel of citizens sound out in their own language on the state of the world – in Spanish, English, Welsh, Greek, French, Portugese…and Yiddish…
‘I think that the people that are in charge of us, the planet, are absolutely sedrate, real mashugganas…It’s a right chutzpah that they take advantage…So many ferbrissener ponims in this world, it just makes you ferklempt looking at them, such drek…So much sorrus…we need to look above it and overcome it…Arber drek!’…etc…
Magic Mothers is a truly collective album with contributions from a musical delicatessen. It’s been worth the wait in gold…
To sample some tracks and buy Poppycock’s Magic Mothers on vinyl, CD and limited edition packages – click here
To read Una Baines on The Fall and Prestwich Hospital for the Bury New Road project – click here and click here
