Sleeve notes for Belbury Poly’s 5th album suggest the soundtrack to a travelling salesman’s adventures with an acid-spiked ploughman’s lunch, somewhere in early seventies rural England.
Belbury Poly play like dispirited sixties psychedelic survivors, reluctantly meeting the demands of television or advertising commissions in the subsequent decade, redeeming their banal compositions with snatches of haunting folk melodies, crunchy hairy funk basslines and experimental electronics.
The overall effect is disorientating and brilliant, the past recreated in a nostalgic fug, stabs of sincerity slashing through superficial veils of irony.
The Belbury Tales are both satirical social critiques, and lost world laments.
(11/3/12)
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BBC iPlayer edition of discussion of Stewart Lee on A Good Read
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