Shining Gloriously Through The Sky

Bright & Early – Love Is Overtaking Me (MP3)

Bright & Early – Planted A Thought (MP3)

I have a new favourite pop group and they’re called Bright & Early. Unfortunately they existed for about a week in the late 80’s and to the best of my knowledge only two of their songs ever made it on to a release (and to the best of Discogs’s knowledge too!).

Fortunately for posterity’s sake they had a no-talent bum singer/guitarist/cellist/songwriter in the band called Arthur Russell, and the release containing these two songs just so happens to be the excellent ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ compilation Audika released late last year as not only another excellent piece to the Arthur Russell puzzle, but also as a companion to the also wonderful ‘Wild Combination’ documentary about Arthur Russell’s life.

I read a comment around the time of the release of ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ describing it as “further raping the corpse of Arthur Russell”. What a load of bollocks. Without the posthumous releases we’d have what? A handful of 12”s and ‘World Of Echo’. As Tom Lee, Arthur Russell’s boyfriend explains in ‘Wild Combination’: this is all music that Arthur wanted to be released for people to hear but no-one would touch it at the time (and the bit where Tom plays the original tape of ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ for the interviewer is a really lovely moment). Okay, this compilation starts with some scratchy early demo stuff from the absolute beginning of his career, but there’s also the beautifully produced alt-pop of ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ and ‘Planted A Thought’ and crucially none of it’s been heard before. All of it is also so fantastically different from pretty much everything else that’s been made available so far: ‘Close My Eyes’ and ‘Maybe She’ are two simple acoustic country-folk songs and they’re beautiful.

With that rant over, here’s another: now Mr and Mrs Audika, how’s about a vinyl version of this since you’ve bloody done one for all the others?

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