The nights are drawing in, the plague stats get ever worse, the Tories’ cynical mismanagement of everything constantly plumbs newly unbelievable depths. We organise food banks, we do our best to sustain those in our communities who need help, we reach up, we hunker down. We need a sound track. One with humanity, warmth, depth, intelligence, perceptiveness, optimism. Oh, and supremely catchy tunes.

Here it is. Climbing Frame by Gecko. Album of the year. Again.

(I say again, because his 2017 release Volcano was my album of that year, and has since progressed to being my favourite car CD of all time, which says a lot given 15,000 miles a year touring over 40 years, back in the old days when live gigs were a thing.)

Gecko does rap/talkover/storytelling over clever, diversely melodic soundscapes. He is as English as all the good things about England are: curry, IPA, Captain Sensible, David Attenborough, Lewis Dunk.

If you must have a comparison, for the younger generation think Jamie T without the Itching powder in his underpants and, for mine, a more wordy and, yes, more sensible Captain Sensible, creator of so many Damned good melodies over the years along with his poet collaborator Martin Newell.  

He  starts off superbly with Can’t Know All the Songs – an amiably clever broadside against people who see someone with a guitar and think they are there to play covers (bad enough) and by extension will know any cover the audience cares to shout out (an actual, literal thought crime).

It reminds me of a heated argument I once had with the leader of a local covers band who said: “When people go out they want to hear stuff they know.” My retort – that logically that would mean we would still be dancing round a camp fire in circles grunting, since no one would ever have written anything – didn’t go down too well.

Nail, head, Gecko.

Climbing Frame is as sweet as its forerunner Sweet Jane, a lovely piece of velvet for the musical underground, those timeless three chords beautifully recycled into a story of a fallen tree used as a climbing frame by kids... and a whole lot more.

And then comes Soaring which actually brought tears to my eyes, a beautiful tale of an old man reminiscing in an old people’s home about a boyhood encounter with a beautiful presence from nature. 

For the first time in my life I reflected on my 63 years and thought: that could be me, one day. And if it is it won’t be a pheasant I’ll remember, but a smooth snake. I was seven too, and it was the first and only one I have ever seen in the wild. It is etched into my brain. The power of music.

Then comes a song about Laika, the dog sent into space by the Soviet Union about the same time as I was born, which made that one very personal too. Thing is, that is what Gecko does so well: he draws you in to his songs, makes them so easy to relate to, and they are brimming over with intelligence, kindness and simple…humanity.

His beautiful love song All I Know is another one: a wonderful paean to the security of love in insecure times which, again, though I am twice his age, reflects my own feelings for the woman I love.

But perhaps his greatest talent is for writing about the passage of life itself, the transition from infant to child to adult, in a simple, accessible, beautiful way. And on A Whole Life he does just that.

This album is the dog’s bollocks. The canine’s absolute testicles. Do yourself a favour – listen to it on Spotify and then go to geckoofficial.bandcamp.com and buy it. And get its predecessor Volcano too. They are both great big existential duvets of life-affirming gorgeousness.  

My collected works is out, by the way. It’s called Heart On My Sleeve and it’s 336 pages of 40 years’ worth of poems and song lyrics. Available from attilathestockbroker.bandcamp.com. More about that soon...

 
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