Bewitching legacy of Peel favourites.
Nobody could ever have replaced The Fall in John Peel's affections, but The Delgados came pretty close. After forming in 1995, the Glasgow band managed a remarkable hit rate in peel's infamous end-of-year list, the Festive Fifty, even scooping the number one spot in 1998 with Pull The Wires From The Wall. But according to the chatty, scatty liner notes that accompany this double-CD collection - uncredited, but obviously penned by affable Delgados bassist Stewart Henderson - the mutual appreciation between the band and the legendary DJ came about almost by accident.
After The Delgados - comprising Henderson, vocalists/guitarists Alun Woodward and Emma Pollock, plus drummer Paul Savage - had recorded a four-track session for Radio Scotland's music show Beat Patrol in 1995, an enthusiastic producer sent the tapes to John Peel. After broadcasting that original session - thus justifying its inclusion here - Peel invited the band to record the first of many follow-ups in the famous Maida Vale studios.
By their own admission, The Delgados were still at an early stage in their musical development, but instead of playing it safe with block chords and obvious harmonies, the band always seemed to be reaching toward the answer to some mythical rock music equation, showing all their squiggly, stop-start fuzzy logic along the way.
Their ability to glean flashes of double-jointed melody out of the most angular or raucous guitar soundscapes is a constant throughout the 29 tracks here (and that includes the five cover versions). Though you might expect the first disc to sound like a band growing up in public, by their third Peel session, The Delgados had pretty much cracked it. Everything Goes Around The Water and Pull The Wires From The Wall demonstrate their knack for injecting a sensuous ache into twisted nursery rhyme arrangements, aided by Woddward and Pollock's vocals, plaintive and pure respectively. There are a few misfires - the plinky-plonk Sucrose, some ropy record-scratching on Blackpool - but even these middling tracks are still intriguing.
Disc two kicks off with a session recorded around the release of The Great eastern, the 2000 album that secured The Delgados a Mercury Music Prize nomination and a hike in exposure. The session versions of No Danger and Accused Of Stealing might not have the production fairy dust of their album counterparts, but there's an emotional lushness that more than compensates. After that, things go a bit haywire, with covers - including ELO's Mr Blue Sky and The Dead Kennedy's California Uber Alles - that are as enjoyable as they are incongruous. There's also a sparse reading of Burns's Parcel Of Rogues, featuring some of Woodward and Pollock's most effective close singing to date.
the final session, delivering acoustic versions of tracks from the band's underrated 2004 album Universal Audio, doesn't carry hints of their impending fracture (the band split up the following year, but still own and operate their homegrown Chemikal Underground label), though there's still a tangible sense of melancholia.
Gallus, bewitching, frequently awkward and unpredictable - this decade-spanning compilation is a fitting monument to The Delgados, codifying a legacy which could have remained frustratingly dissolute. [4/5]
Graeme Virtue