Reviews

Artist:Bridget St. John
Album: From There/To Here: UK/US Recordings (1974-1982)
Label: Cherry Red
Tracks: 16+17+17
Website: https://www.cherryred.co.uk

A few years back, Cherry Red released a box-set gathering together Bridget's first three LPs and a few odd "escape" tracks, along with some early BBC sessions. This new box-set is marketed as its sequel, carrying on from where the earlier box left off. It charts Bridget's progress through the near-decade from 1974 to 1982, a period of changing fortunes and initial uncertainty of direction - "paths taken after the endings of Dandelion", referring to the short-lived record label which had housed and nurtured Bridget's talent from the beginning.

The set opens with a fresh remaster of Bridget's (first post-Dandelion) fourth album, Jumblequeen, which had appeared on the well-respected Chrysalis label in 1974, and mostly comprised songs written while in Derbyshire, whence Bridget had relocated from London. Considering that it was a period of painful personal trauma for Bridget, there was a pleasing and relaxed feel to the album sessions, on which her trademark warm, soft, intimate vocals were surrounded by some excellent backing musicians including Stefan Grossman, Chick Churchill, Mike Giles and Dave Winter, while the songs themselves ranged from gently reflective to outright charming. Also included was a creditable cover of Sweet Painted Lady, a wistful Elton John song from his magnum opus Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. This set's first disc is topped up with half a dozen "further UK recordings" of songs that I'd not come across anywhere else, the provenance (or even existence) of which is (mysteriously) nowhere referenced in the accompanying booklet; three of them are previously unreleased, including a well-paced cover of Dylan's Just Like A Woman that's cryptically dubbed "Battered Ornaments version".

Onto Disc 2, which moves the story forward to Bridget's years in New York (she moved to Greenwich Village in summer 1976, and stayed in NY for many years, having settled quickly into a city to which she felt she had creatively "come home"). The disc is a straight reissue of the album-length collection Take The 5ifth, which John Tobler of RGF Records had assembled for Bridget back in 1995. It comprised 17 of the many demos Bridget had recorded in New York over the period, mostly in 1978/79 and for a variety of studios. Background information and other detail is scant here, however (a more generous helping of info, in the form of lyrics and credits, is given in the booklet for the original RGF issue).

In the context of the above, Disc 3's subtitle The New York Sessions may seem a little puzzling - does it refer to those demos remaining after the cherrypick of Take The 5ifth? Quality-wise, this doesn't appear to be the case, although stylistically the range of material is every bit as varied and compelling, with plenty of fine songs to choose from. The combined booklet for the box does give some clues, in that some mention is made of backing band lineups, producers, dates and studio venues such as July 1977 (Right Track) July 1979 (RPM Sound) and location/s unknown (1981/82), possibly including Roxy Recorders. Frustratingly, the detail in the booklet doesn't readily correspond to the bracketed sources credited on the cardboard sleeve for the disc itself, and one would need better knowledge of the musicians' playing to identify individual tracks at all accurately (additionally, some songs are uncredited beyond the bare title on the tracklist). All but three of the tracks on Disc 3 are listed as previously unreleased, and several give interestingly different arrangements and interpretations of songs from elsewhere on the set (Curious & Woolly, Castaway, Crazy Heart, I Need It Sometimes). The overall picture, then, is disconcertingly inconsistent, since tracks from right across the timespan are interspersed almost randomly on this disc. Also, since the earlier box-set included the majority of BBC sessions up to 1972, it would have been useful (and logical) for this set to include the 1974 and 1975 BBC sessions (previously available on an excellent Hux anthology) to complete the jigsaw. A missed opportunity, then.

So, no complaints about the quality of the music on this set, or the high standard of remastering, but sadly the presentation lets it down, falling short of Cherry Red's usual meticulous standard. It's great to have Bridget's own 20-page essay-memoir, of course, but I believe the purchaser also needs the comparative sessionography detail (together with the lyrics) in order to appreciate more fully the fruits of this creative yet less well documented period in Bridget's career.

David Kidman

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