I’m not sure what to make of this album from Roger Knott. It is without doubt an earnest album but, to hoist it by its own petard, it seems to positively revel in its ordinariness. Like some Saturday night pub singer, Mr Knott rattles out jolly songs about very ordinary things in an unsurprisingly vaguely mid-Atlantic accent. One song in and I had the knife out for surely a metaphorical stabbing was on the cards.
But did Roger Knott get the stainless steel embedded in his heart? Well no. Much as I wanted to despise the sheer obviousness of each and every song, the wooden performances and shiny Formica arrangements, I just couldn’t. Instead I found myself smiling inanely through “Ghost From Your Past” and “Frisbee Street” like those old ladies in Glasgow do when they hear Harry Margolis on a Saturday afternoon. Carried away by the sheer likeableness of it all, I was.
Too nice to be slaughtered, “Big News From A Small Town” makes the grade. Who’d have figured that?