Sunday, 11 June 2017

An Evening With Edward Woodward: Edward Woodward - DJM 1973

'An Evening With Edward Woodward'? If you'd floated that invitation past me a few weeks ago I'd have assumed it would involve a load of hoary old acting anecdotes and some off the cuff recitals from Shakespeare. That's because my main knowledge about Woodward is of him as an actor, and specifically an actor  in 'The Wicker Man' and 'Callan'; I didn't know he fancied himself as a singer and had something of a back catalogue behind him. It's not a revelation on par with, for example, finding out your mother used to be a porn star I grant you, but it's a surprise nonetheless.
 
And the next surprise is that he can actually pull it off; actors turning singers don't have the best of pedigrees in terms of quality and I put this on the deck with a sense of trepidation, but I'm happy to report that Woodward has a perfectly serviceable tenor and crystal clear diction to boot which he uses to good effect rather than trying to ham it up club singer style. True, it's firmly in undemanding easy listening mode (think Andy Williams but without any fussy orchestration), but what helps him out is a clever choice of songs that manage to mix the familiar ('The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', 'When I Fall In Love) and the unfamiliar ('Today I Killed A Man I Didn't Know', 'We'll Only Hurt Ourselves') without ever resorting to cliché or else being studiously 'difficult' or bloody minded.
 
But - oh dear - despite these positives Woodward manages to pull defeat from the jaws of victory and spoil all of his good work by his prefacing of every single song on the album with a minute or two of introductory spoken word where he explains in highfalutin style why he likes it and why he recorded it. Such reminisces may work fine in the context of, say, a set of liner notes, but on a record designed to create a mellow mood these rambling little talks shatter it like a hammer through glass and sour the atmosphere as surely as letting rip with intermittent farts during a candlelit dinner for two. What was he thinking? I don't know, but what I do know is that they're the icebergs that sink this project and leave me with an album that I don't know what to do with, though I do know that, having sat through it once, I'm never going to sit through it all again.

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