If you only buy one new album this year, let it be TV Smith’s ‘Handwriting’

TV Smith

Handwriting

(Easy Action CD - worldwide)

(JKP red vinyl - Germany)

(coming soon - glow in the dark vinyl- UK))

Spin Cycle remembers, owns, and still regularly listens to the very first TV Smith album it ever purchased. It was November 1977, a rainy night in London, and Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts was the debut LP by what was, and remains, the greatest punk band of them all — literate, curious, vivacious and assertive, and built wholly upon a non-stop streak of era-defining lyrical prophesy

String out the drip-feed, they're losing their world,

They're losing their hard boys and magazine girls.

Advert illegal, T.V. as outlaw, motive as spell.

They'll see the books burn. They'll be 451,

It's people against things and not against each other.

Out of the pre-pack, into the fear, into themselves.

(“The Great British Mistake” - © TV Smith, 1977)

It wasn’t Smith’s first ever album, but it would be 2012 before most homes had the opportunity to hear the self-titled private press that was Sleaze’s 1975 one-off. Even more red seawater has flowed under the bridge since then, but Smith… two further bands and 15 new studio albums older … remains and retains the genius of his earliest showings. That is apparent from the moment Handwriting rides in aboard one of the defining anthems of today. It’s called “Who’s Got The Time” and it goes like this…

It’s been three years since Lockdown Holiday postcarded that bizarre cultural schism that was the pandemic, although — as with all the other gaps in Smith’s 21st century output — the time in-between was stuffed with other projects. There was a frenzied recreation of Crossing the Red Sea; the glorious reanimation of his 1977 collaboration with Richard Strange; he even snuck an American tour into the mix.

But now Handwriting is here and, frankly, it’s astonishing. As remarkable as that first Adverts album, and as surprising as their second. As electrifying as Channel 5 (1983) and as diverse as I Delete (2014); as tuneful as March of the Giants (1993); as aggressive as Cheap, as… as… as…

Comparisons are meaningless at the best of times, but Spin Cycle’s first response upon hearing Handwriting was “it’s TV’s Hunky Dory,” and successive plays have only reinforced that delight. Anyone can write an album about a space alien falling to earth. Not so many can so exquisitely portray the world it will find when it gets there.

“Who’s Got The Time” sets the mood for the album, questioning of course (with a title like that, how could it not be?), but so light-hearted in its litany of things the singer does not have the time for and the role call of characters with whom he shares that assertion. There’s a lovely slice of self-awareness, too, for what better way to celebrate the time spent replaying the Adverts than by disdaining the opportunity to make “another cover version of ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’”?

The sound of the album hits you hard, the organic crunchiness of an other-worldly Sun single, hot valves and barking woofers, fluttering tape leaders, VU meters in the red and, from beginning to end, a sense of all-embracing warmth that you could never recreate with artificial flavoring.

Its very title itself lends an air of antique craftsmanship to the proceedings; if you need to picture the scene as Handwriting was recorded, let it be Smith and producer/multi-instrumentalist Gerry Diver in a hut on the moors, with every available surface draped with another musical instrument. Diver alone is credited with harmonium, mandolin, bouzouki, banjo, piano, tenor guitar, bass guitar, percussion and chimes; while percussionist Pete Flood adds his own arsenal to the array.

Smith’s lyrics, seldom less than compulsive, are here insistent too, be it the economy of “Blank Screens,” the militance of “Common Enemy,” the raw hopelessness of “As Good As It Gets,” or the post-lockdown uncertainty of “Scared to Show Your Face,” its panicked lyric echoed in the stricken, rapping percussion that woodpeckers its way through the hook.

There’s the gripping drama of a title track that envisions a world in which taking up pen and paper is not simply a lost art, but a forbidden one as well. “Handwriting,” Smith reminds us, “cannot be tracked,” and sedition has never sounded so simple; nor anonymity so artful.

There’s the fractured jugband psychedelia of “You Need Help,” as compulsive as anything Smith has ever written; and there’s the most haunted of them all, “Hurry On.” Which could have been the last dance at the Overlook Hotel, and might have closed this album on the greatest cliff hanger of all. In fact, it appears just a little past the halfway mark, which makes it feel more portentous still.

Yet the words tell only half of the story. Eerie chords, slow drip dynamics, percolating rhythms, Handwriting is built upon the same suspense and drama that render Neil Young’s On The Beach and Lou Reed’s New York such monumental achievements whether you like them or not. Arguably this is Smith’s most sonically intriguing album since Channel 5, with its own electrifying disregard for comfort and security underpinning the oft-apocalyptic nature of the lyrics.

It is, perhaps, no accident that “One Minute to Midnight” — a song whose doomsday scenario.certainly harkens back to Channel 5’s premonitory perils — also nods back (in feel, if not substance), towards that album’s “Fire in the Darkness.” The big difference is, that song demanded we shout our concerns from the rooftops. This one asks whether we’ll ever be able to get our messages out.

Intentional too, surely, was the decision to close this album, like that one, with a gorgeous melody, a strummed guitar, a yearning vocal, a heartsick lyric. Except, instead of one man in his laboratory celebrating his “Beautiful Bomb,” “Children Of A Dying Sun” mourns a world in which mass destruction has stepped out of the realms of “what if?” and into those of “why not?”

“Despite our intellect,” he sings, “war is what we do the best,” and the dreams that permeate the second half of the song are just that, dreams.

Hunky Dory, Bowie once said, “was written when I thought we still had a chance.” Handwriting is an acceptance that maybe we don’t. But only maybe.

Let the planet survive,

I have always loved you,

Just wish I’d told you at the time.

Children of a dying sun

Come on there’s work to be done.”

(“Children Of A Dying Sun” © TV Smith, 2024)

Neil Young’s seagulls might still be just within reach.

Pre-order Handwriting here

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