The Donald gets close up and personal

Don McGlashan, ‘Warm Hand’
(Arch Hill AHR024)
CD review: ****½
In 1993, “the worst industrial fire in the history of capitalism” occurred at the Kader Industrial toy factory outside Bangkok, seriously injuring 469 workers and killing a further 188. Desperate and trapped by the fire, many had jumped to their deaths. The workers had been making Sesame Street, Bart Simpson and Muppets toys for western markets.

And so we find ourselves a long way from home, and a long way from three-minute pop single territory. To listen to Toy Factory Fire is to spend seven minutes in the kind of place only writers as confident and skilful as Dylan, Gabriel, Costello and Zevon normally feel at home. And the second song on Don McGlashan’s long-awaited first solo album is the sucker-punch: affecting and thought-provoking by turns, it follows the more straightforward outing This Is London. I confess to knowing nothing of the fire until McGlashan’s lyrics (“Fire exits just painted on/Locks and chains to keep out the unions”) provoked me to Google it. It’s possible the song was inspired by the book Industrial Inferno: The story of the Thai Toy Factory Fire; or that it’s a metaphor for powerlessness; or that McGlashan was moved to document the fact that the fire was given a wide berth by the media. In any case, it does the right thing: stays with you long after the album has played out, and in an even more poignant way than a great hook.

I can’t talk convincingly about influences, but I can say that I’m reminded of several artists while listening to ‘Warm Hand’, and most are from another era: the first few bars of Harbour Bridge has shades of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, for instance, and the pedal steel on Courier recalls the main riff from Neil Young's Harvest Moon.

I must admit to being strongly predisposed to McGlashan’s style of songwriting, not least because he’s capable of that most intangible skill: distilling the essence of ‘New Zealandness’ into melody, harmony, rhythm and words. Neil and Tim Finn do it, too; but it’s a gift as rare and endangered as the place. It’s almost as though this music is hardwired; long before I arrived in New Zealand, Dominion Road and Anchor Me were essential listening whenever I needed to time-travel. McGlashan hasn’t lost that skill, even when he’s writing about other places. And now, thanks to the success of his composition Bathe In The Water from the No 2 soundtrack (sung by Hollie Smith, the song is not, I hasten to add, on this record), this modest independent solo release won’t be dismissed as a hard-to-find aberration.

There are some world-class melodies on this record, from This Is London to Sean Donnelly’s I Will Not Let You Down and the deceptively simple and beautiful piano on Miracle Sun (that one will sound tantalisingly familiar to Kiwi telly-viewers). But McGlashan doesn’t overwork anything; there’s a pleasing sense — or at least the illusion — of the first-take about most of his lead vocals. In my ‘preview’ of this record, I alluded to its intimacy, and that word still strikes me as the most relevant: ‘Warm Hand’ sounds as though it’s been recorded for you, personally. Listen to this grown-up ‘demo tape’ through headphones and you’re right there in the studio control room, watching the level meters in the darkness.

So far, ‘Warm Hand’ has largely been well-received by fans and critics, and while an overseas release may be some time off, there’s nothing like playing hard-to-get to lift complacent music business executives off their fat arses and thus to release their cheque-books.

To silence the cries of “Call yourself a reviewer!” from the Rip It Up, Q and NME readers among you, I’m duty-bound to gripe about something. The CD booklet contains no lyrics. As our Director-General might say, “Call me old-fashioned…” but I think this is a shame. Of all New Zealand’s singer-songwriters, McGlashan’s words bear scrutiny on the printed page better than most. No doubt this was a deliberate omission and cost was a constraint. But it’s such a well-produced booklet in other respects that one might have expected better value from an artist we know cares for his listeners.

When I asked a friend whether he’d heard ‘Warm Hand’ yet, he referred to the recent Listener Q&A, in which “the Donald” complained that there’s a lot of people with vested interests in keeping us distracted so that they can sell us stuff we don’t need. “So I asked myself, ‘Do I need Don’s new album or do I just want it, in a consumerist way?’” He decided that he didn’t need it, and so he didn’t buy it.

As one so often infuriated by works of art (and otherwise) — each clamouring to be watched, listened to, read, learnt about or commented upon — I sympathise with his choice: you do reach a point where your ‘hard drive’ seems choked to the crashing point. But sometimes all you need is a good defragmentation. ‘Warm Hand’ does it for me. Let it clear some good space in your head, too.