'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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