Winston Watusi Music Plus

This week I review a new album by Liam Hagan, which has amazed and fascinated me.

But first, a gig I wanted to mention since it's celebrating a debut release. First, specifically, because some of you only read that bit. As someone so elegantly put it in a recent email: 'that's where the jokes are (sometimes)”.

Okay. This Saturday, September 3, noisy Tauranga misfits Somacaine launch their debut single ‘Those Girls' at the Jam Factory with support from Antebellum and Liquid Nails. It's a bluesy little offering – available on the usual digital platforms – with a 'witchy woman” theme that rocks harder as it goes along. The four-piece Battle of The Bands finalists recorded it with local producer Nate Sowter and I'll return to them at more length at a later date.

Right. Liam Hagan. Liam has a new album. Recorded at Welcome Bay's Colourfield Studio, it leans towards musical theatre but is hard to define. And it's kinda wonderful…

Liam has been performing in musicals for 15 years, winning a Zony (regional theatre award) for best supporting male in Chess. Last year he played the title role in a production of Sweeney Todd. He's also a musician, playing percussion and keyboards for productions of The Producers and Evita and released a debut album, 'Vatican City Mardi Gras' in 2015.

Humour

Rooted in musical theatre, it showed both control of the medium and a left-field sense of humour: the opener, in the spirit of The Producers, is a love ballad sung by Eva Braun. But while that album featured piano-based small band backing, his new offering 'Zoonomy' throws it all at the wall. Western Swing! An operatic choir! Huge twangy guitars! Literary titans! Spooky country! This is an album of manifold pleasures, a variety show flaunting Liam's skills both as a writer and arranger.

First up 'Make It To The End' starts as a piano ballad before morphing into an aspirational showtune. Liam delivers his own harmonies and in a stage production this would undoubtedly end with the singer's arms stretched aloft in yearning triumph. The only song not written by Liam follows, the cheerfully witty 'Astro Turf' from Aucklander Bray Jeffrey, a pitch-perfect take on Dan Hicks' light-hearted style of smooth swing: 'I like the Astro Turf 'cause you never have to mow it”.

Things get considerably darker with 'Take It Down', the sort of Gothic murder ballad you get from The Handsome Family. The beautiful atmospheric arrangement includes a waterphone, played by a Seattle musician Robb Bockman.

Sweet and Eccentric

Then there's 'Grieg And Poe Meet For Coffee' a song in the long tradition of fictitious meetings between famous characters - my favourite is The Weakerthans' 'Our Retired Explorer Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris 1961' - and it's as sweet and eccentric as the title suggests.

More real people are alluded to in 'You'll Find Me Wherever I Am'; Connie Converse, Donald Crowhurst and D. B. Cooper, each famous for their disappearances, get an epic rip-roaring Western treatment from a massive band with every element - sparkling piano (Marco Cremaschini), giant whammy-bar guitar (Iain Archibald), choir - in there and cooking. It's a great production of a great song.

'Eyes Like The Day, Hair Like The Night' is a love song that could be a lost Peter Sarstedt out-take but it's the title track, with its weird meaning of a revolutionary animal take-over, that really blew me away.

It's an a cappella song with six singers, from Liam's baritone to soprano Ashleen Fahy, though it sounds like a lot more. They sing two melodic parts then mesh them both together in a glorious anthem, an ode to an inevitable animal uprising that only gets funnier the more seriously it is presented.

I've been playing it to everyone I can. They think I'm mad of course, but you really should have a listen on-line. It's on Spotify and elsewhere. One can only admire the single-minded vision that follows through on such difficult grand ideas.

My hat is off to Liam Hagan, whose eccentricity and individuality is fortunately matched by the talent and determination needed to make something like this possible. Damn fine.