If anything, The Magical World has improved with age. This summer, the latest attempt to manoeuvre it into the canon is being launched, with a slightly expanded reissue of the original record, and a second album, The Olde World, that gathers up ten lost songs and alternate versions from the original sessions. But while Head seems unfussed by his relative obscurity, it is still hard to accept that a masterpiece like The Magical World Of The Strands remains so marginal. It’s the sort of hard-luck legend loved by obsessive music fans, not least music critics. Since then, there have been a handful of fine albums, each accompanied with bold claims (Noel Gallagher, never the most discreet salesman, released 2006’s Corner Of Miles And Gil on his Sour Mash label) and corresponding disinterest from the wider listening public. The Magical World Of The Strands took two years to record, and another two to be released, by which time the Heads had returned to the Shack brand name and become embroiled in further major label shenanigans. The band was called The Strands, though to most people it looked pretty much like Shack, featuring as it did Mick Head and his younger brother John, a diffident guitar virtuoso who was also, tentatively, proving himself to be a useful songwriter. Shack and The Pale Fountains’ recordings had mostly been blighted by major label expediencies, but Bismuth had a better idea: let Head and his latest band make a record at their own idiosyncratic pace, free of any pressure. To this small but vociferous cabal, Mick Head was a psychedelic visionary, a songwriter who could relocate the dreams and possibilities suggested by Love, The Byrds and Tim Buckley to his own Liverpool streets.
A follow-up, Waterpistol, had been recorded in 1991 but remained in limbo (it would sneak out on a German indie label, Marina, to great acclaim and traditionally negligible sales, in 1995).īismuth, though, was one of a group of fanatics who saw beyond Head’s reputation as an erratic commercial pariah. One album, Zilch, had come out in 1988, with good songs compromised by a flashily unsympathetic production.
His first band, The Pale Fountains, had been hamstrung by the aesthetics and politics of the 1980s music business, and his second band, Shack, appeared to have gone the same way. McNally Intro G Verse 1 G Closer now Am Closer now its done G It's all begun Verse 2 G Dr.Head’s career, not for the first or last time, was in a bit of a mess. Artist-Shack Song-Closer Album-On the Corner of Miles and Gil Writer-Mick Head Tabbed by S.
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