Tales From Europe – 40 – Released 7 March 2023

Just as the latest season of crime drama Grace closes having once again exposed Brighton’s sordid underbelly and iconic landmarks, Tales From Europe, the band from the same place, jump us with a surprise musical cold case. But it’s far from cold. Kinda washed up with the tide like one of DI Grace’s victims.

All the way from 1983 in fact… when all I knew of the Brighton Music scene was banging my head to Status Quo on their 1+9+8+2 20^th anniversary tour at The Brighton Centre (in ’82 obvs). By the way please don’t add 20+40 – as it’s a significant number and too many of Quo are sadly in the great 12 bar set in the sky. Brighton & Hove wasn’t even a City back then! Lucky for us Derek Luckhurst (Vocals) and Alasdair Mackenzie (Guitar/Backing Vocals) decided to reconnect and examine their own less-than sordid underbellies. 

Quite literally lose yourself in Lost Another Day – a stunning opener to the album which sets a vibrant scene for the band and what you are about to hear. The video leaves me with the intriguing puzzle as to the connection to the RMS Caronia in those retro cine clips…

Hide from the Madness could have been written and recorded in any one of the forty intervening years as its lyrics extract that exact feeling in a liltingly catchy little number. It’s just great, it’s an ear worm. Somehow timeless – it’s always mad out there – so wherever your personal ‘out there’ is, this is for you. Stay indoors, hide and listen to this.

There are plenty of great tracks sandwiched in here and sure we can feel ourselves pinging off Elvis Costello but without being stereo-typically 80s either (after all Elvis wasn’t). The Image Breaks Me is another great example of a tune you won’t feel you’ve heard before yet can readily identify with. And there’s a lot of that on this album; melodic and different too. Good stuff.

Appear of the End Show

So is it a reprise? Is it retro? Is it an encore?

Well, what it’s most definitely not, is a ‘repeat ‘til fade’. Usefully 40  encapsulates the energy of being that age with the maturity of knowing where the bodies are buried (DI Grace could learn a thing or two from them). Long serving groups must, like all of us, lose that energy and hunger for what your dreams were in the early days. Perhaps when you have eliminated them from your inquiries. This hasn’t happened here. Whatever the long sabbatical was about, it worked OK. Reconvening after all this time has been well worthwhile.

Unearthing youthful energy is quite something and not without hazard. For it necessitates ignoring that original creative uncertainty that accompanies looking over your shoulder, hearing that little voice going, “Jeez, did I really write that?” or “Oh God, I just lifted that from XYZ”. Yes, the trick is dumping that little voice and embracing “Christ, we were on fire that summer”, and running with that.

The Blend of an Era

Having only previously picked up on Derek Luckhurst’s intervening solo ventures (If you find a CD of A Tonic for Plato – buy it! Keep it!), this rebuilding of something I’ve never heard before could just have been a journey into Eighties stuff that didn’t make it – and let’s face it there’s questionable stuff of many genres, of any era that DID make it. Yet it’s not just streets away from that, it’s a City away from that, much like the Town that used to be on the end of the A23.

Guilty Pleasure Beach

For now, also, I just want to luxuriate in the sheer joy of decent bloody Intros; 4 decades ago people wrote them and agonised over constructing them. These guys obviously did/do (Remember Nicky Horne’s “Beat The Intro” competition on Capital FM?). Uniquity was always everything in an Intro. Discrete, distinct and driven, that’s what Intros need to be. Now almost extinct due to the wretched scroll/click/stream/scroll/click/stream nightmare we now listen in, I just let these beauties wash over me like plastic waste curdling round the barnacled leg of a pier. I’m not gonna hide from that madness.

Standing Novation

As the Beatles once put it:

Luckhurst-MacKenzie, writing the words to an album that no-one would hear / Not for For-ty year…

Glad you did guys… I guess the original tunes and 40 are literally two scores apart (boom boom) but they actually plant themselves firmly in 2023. And there’s a brand new album in the offing – as they say down on the coast. Can’t wait!

In the meantime the Grace production team could do a whole lot worse than picking any or all of these tracks as a backdrop to the 2024 run of the series. The themes explored in 40 could tie in very easily with their eponymous DI’s desperate back story. Suggest they think about that.

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40 – Tales From Europe