Camberwell Now
All's Well

Camberwell Now formed in '82 after the breakup of This Heat. With Charles Hayward on drums, vocals, and keyboards, Trefor Goronwy on bass, guitars, and vocals, and Stephen Rickard on the "tape switchboard" who was the sound engineer for This Heat. The last four tracks, from the EP "Greenfingers," also feature Maria Lamburn on saxophones, piccolo, and viola.

The band left us with an album, "The Ghost Trade," and two EPs "Meridian" and indeed "Greenfingers." Most of this material was later compiled in this "All's Well" released by RecRec of Zurich in 1992.

Knowing some of Hayward's solo work, I venture to place him in the role of the band's leader. While not an overly refined drummer or an excellent singer, he is undoubtedly endowed with great personality, creativity, and grit.

I will begin by using the yellow and blue album of This Heat, already reviewed on these pages, as a starting point. Camberwell Now has a decidedly warmer and more melodic sound than This Heat; I find them also more homogeneous and melodic but not less original, on the contrary.

The guitar seems absent. It is the bass and the drums that dominate, laying unusual rhythmic carpets on which the voices of Hayward and Goronwy sing lyrics often referring to the alienated reality of the proletarian man, a window into the British scene of the early eighties, but still relevant today. This reality is also sensed by the continuous tension and slightly unnerving sounds. There are instrumental sections where the sounds of Rickard's "tape switchboard" are highlighted, with his hypnotic loops contrasting the striking rhythmic base. Their genre is difficult to classify, undoubtedly rooted in rock where the complexity of the compositions is framed almost within the simplicity of pop music, a skill at which Robert Wyatt is a master.

"All's Well" is recommended for those who enjoy discovering different ways of interpreting music without resorting to too much timbral and compositional complexity. It should not be hard to find as it was deservedly reissued in 2006 by ReR of the legendary Chris Cutler.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Paolo Chang and Alessandro Achilli for introducing me to this album and many other beautiful works in their now-defunct magazine "Musiche".