The Good, the Bad & the Queen
Stories From England [B-Sides Collection]

Rainy Grounds: The Good & The Bad Weather in the Mood of Your Folk Mother.
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Paragraph 1 Calls from London. (incoming traffic) Dark coats, work boots, flat caps, trilbies and top hats, combat boots, plasters on noses and bandages on hands, leather boots from the '70s. A basilica, a black cat. On the faces, the signs of time passing. The Good, The Bad & The Queen is a British superband. Even before offering a sound microcosm, they propose an imagery of an English public house with a menu of sausages, beans, eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, mushrooms, dry and melted cheese, beer, butter biscuits, tea, long coffee, luckies, London rain and fog. A beautiful name, a rainy and smoky folk, worker and artisan, actually elusive and rarefied that connects with certain dub roots and alterations of Kingston reggae without the cult and dogmas of Jah, to warm and saturnine words in almost resigned daily life lyrics soaked with sorrow. A circus-like inclination from a funfair that perhaps makes everything even more melancholic, tender, moving. Herculean.
Musicians undoubtedly of great skill. They play ragged, disheveled, yet impeccable.
They move, undoubtedly, within a strong thematic and musical tradition, faded in image and vanished in a mythical time, from the coasts of Cornwall to Portobello, from Luton to Blackpool, ghost town songs hidden among the greyness of West London's Tories and Labour.
Musically and thematically lucid, linear, poetic. They are the beginning of a conversation, not its end. Gothic temperament, Western fascinations, vintage performances, Highlife.
Modern Gentlemen, all exes. Great taste and great class West Side Century.

Paragraph 2 Northern Souls. GBQ are a super group of actors in a musical broadcast in the evening on State television. They play in a room full of shadows in a darkness melded between gas lights, chains of red and green bulb lights, and a few lamps. Owners of an electroacoustic spell of stillness and leaden melodies, made leisurely, at a slow pace. Minute parts, strings, choirs, accordions, harmonicas, oboes, flutes, music boxes, acoustic arpeggios, polyrhythms, carousel sounds, music band clashes, Simonon's constant bass. Dead of Night, 1945. Dead of Winter.
Gloomy lights of 19th-century lampposts, the new sparkling iron of the Short Century, the rainy seasons, François Maréchal, black and white tones, little theaters, cabaret, vaudeville, chiaroscuros, wooden Coffee & Books places, bells tolling mists and ghosts, Geoffrey Chaucer, literature, a Volume One of an early 20th-century work left unfinished. Lyric and Epic. Postwar Library stuff.

Single Chapter Stories From England (northern lights). The band has released a total of two long plays. January 2007, The Good, The Bad & The Queen (★★★★☆), concept: Life in England during World War II; November 2018, Merrie Land (★★★★), another concept album: Life in UK Post-Brexit. Eleven years. England envisaged as Mother, Woman, Homeland. In between, a few singles.
SFE (★★★☆) is the unofficial collection of all the B-sides of those singles released for the first album, put online by someone, perhaps by themselves, freely available through a link. Six good tracks that indeed could have compromised and perhaps weighed down the muffled, very measured magic of that full length, above all: Start Point [Sketches of Devon], a rattling of cups, spoons, and plates, waltz, jazz, a really nice bass drum in a closing Dancehall; The Bunting Song in its acoustic version graced by a Fender Rhodes, and then the dissonances, the whistles, the grinding frictions of a few sublime moments of Back in the Day. Then a forgettable divertissement, a couple of passable live versions, and a completely useless and bad demo version compared to the final version on record, which was an acoustically exquisitely rare beauty, but that's not the compiler's fault. The stuff put together is decent, but a poor continuity management makes the tracklist overly dispersive as conceived, a compilation service that those from Championship Vinyl would have abhorred angrily.
Ten tracks for 40 minutes of music. On the cover a painting by Simonon himself, "The Thames from Millbank", oil on canvas. For a complete list of their B-sides, only the four versions of the two outtakes from the second album are missing, that is, The Imperial and St. George and the Blackbird.

Paragraph 3 Northern Lunch. The interior of a kitchen at noon on the stoves, many clouds laden with Atlantic water and little sun over the Morlands. Allen does crosswords and toys with dice, drums, and plates more than anything, barely touching and with great precision the snare, somehow minimizing the overall sound, yet never missing his usual incredible percussive intrigues.
Tong washes the dishes, is wary of milk, and on records, he does his job with British phlegm. Taciturn and reserved, it's his northern character. Essential to the whole economic apparatus, in reality rich in so many and such nuances that come forth and grow with listening. Simonon paints rustic pictures with eggs, knives, forks, keychains, cigarette packets, and lighters, fish on plates, and lemons. He digs up his bass from a military cemetery, slices tomatoes, fries bacon for everyone, calls with a cup of instant coffee in hand, and plucks at dub using few picks. Albarn, a patina of wet smog, cooks for the whole brigade, tagliatelle, ravioli with olive oil. He sings, whispers, proclaims folk songs and hammers on the piano and organ keys, plays Tin Pan Alley Blues with all the Beatles piano melancholies within. Soccer and politics, music and politics, food and politics on national radios. On the stove a moka pot.
On the dining table a newspaper with the calendar of all the week's matches.
Mods, Rude Boys, Jamaica. From Nigeria to Pakistan.

Paragraph 4 Down to London. The Good, The Bad & The Queen do not consider themselves a supergroup.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen was not even the chosen name, it was designated as such only later, in the making. They play a winter folk to observe the damp streets from a car and the trees from a room, through a window with wet glass, on a day of strong northwesterly winds.
They use stereotypes, but they know how to use them, offering listeners a dreamlike place of the mind, an evanescent reality that has slowly faded. Daily Press.
Apart from Great Britain, GBQ also cross French countrysides, European culture, and Belgian landscape paintings with all their 1929 Bâtiments Industriels.
They play 45 rpm 7" singles of Platters and Booker T. & the M.G.'s during their interviews.
The term to define their work, perhaps, is not the waxed "ancient," but the more complex "old." Wisdom that becomes, over the years, melodramatic. There's a popular expression in England, beyond Sergio Leone and Morricone, beyond those Spaghetti Western fascinations. There, there's the Good, there's the Bad, and there was the Queen. The Queen was above it all, the Queen could afford anything. Snapshots, from their point of view, of the heart of yesterday's London, today's, and tomorrow's, where the good and the bad lived, and where, as always, there was the Queen. Then will come the souvenirs from the Post-Brexit, the current events of this time, the experiences, the architectures, and still will come the Postcards from Westminster.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen reappeared a second time after an over-decade hiatus. Allen has left recently. GBQ perhaps no longer exists today.
Open the North Pole, Leaving a Great Hole. then... Back in the Day. (outgoing traffic)