Old music: Chris Bell – I Am the Cosmos

This is a counterpoint to my post a while back in praise of Big Star's The Ballad of El Goodo. Chris Bell was the co-leader of Big Star alongside Alex Chilton, but was supposedly stifled in the shadow of the more ebullient – and abrasive – Chilton. And so he quit Big Star in 1972 after their first album, and embarked on a solo career which manged a sort of compressed parallel trajectory to that of his former group: personal problems, difficulties getting his music heard, and then – finally – belated critical acclaim.

In Bell's case this acclaim was, in every sense, much too late. In December 1978, aged just 27, he was killed after he crashed his car while driving home from his father's restaurant in Memphis where, beset by depression and disillusioned with music, he had been working. Earlier that year he had, finally, released his first solo single, I Am the Cosmos, backed with You and Your Sister (both of which were, for years, best known for having been covered by This Mortal Coil). It wasn't for another 14 years that Bell's various unreleased solo recordings and the two tracks from the single were compiled into an album, named after this song.

I Am the Cosmos is wonderful for many reasons: the hazy, slightly dreamlike feel of the recording and of Bell's vocals; his yearning, slightly damaged voice; the guitar solo, which, despite its simplicity, remains one of the best examples of that much-mocked ilk.

I even like the lyrics, supposedly informed by Bell's then-interest in Christianity but which, as has been said by others, also read at times like a cross between 70s cod-mysticism and the worst sort of self-help books of that era. Maybe it's Bell's voice, but they still manage to sound hugely haunting, with the borderline absurd opening words – "Every night I tell myself, I am the cosmos/ I am the wind" – undercut by the almost mocking next line – "But that don't get you back again".