Search - Leon Rosselson :: Harry's Gone Fishing

An important folksinger, but, with one exception, not his be

Michael Schell | www.schellsburg.com | 06/18/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Leon Rosselson is a talented and important British folksinger. His best work comes from roughly the 1970s, square in the English socialist tradition with a gift for melody and biting satirical lyrics. Sadly, little of this older music is available on CD currently, and the present offering pretty well epitomizes the situation: of its eleven tracks, there is one classic song, Rosselson's 1979 recording of You Noble Diggers. The crassness of that recording's audio engineering only adds to the sense of time and place of this great song: an angular Dorian march in praise of its mid-Seventeenth Century English agrarian-anarchists namesakes. Try to get a hold of the original "If I Knew Who the Enemy Was" LP if you can for more songs like that, true vintage Rosselson.



Unfortunately, the other songs, recorded twenty years later in 1999, are a pale echo of Rosselson's glory years. The arrangements are slicker, the backings often commercial-sounding, and without any sense of irony given that the themes of unabashed, unreconstituted, pre-Cold War socialism remain largely the same. One song, entitled Postcards from Cuba, expresses an apparent nostalgia for the most violent and authoritarian years of post-revolution Cuba. Several of the other songs, recorded in 1999, seem to have come from a 1960s time warp. There is no commentary on globalization, post-Cold War concepts of transnational identity, no references to the freedom movements that were then bursting out across formerly totalitarian countries from East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the USSR all the way to Nepal. Hearing these songs reminds me of Dylan during his Gospel period, or Wes Montgomery after he abandoned jazz for studio arrangements of pop songs.



So in conclusion, this is not Rosselson at his best, save one great song from his heyday. Of the other CDs available currently at Amazon US, I'd prefer Perspectives as a better sampler. But until more of his classic LPs become available in digital format, this is otherwise the best you can do."