It would indeed be easy to dismiss an album like “Ponte Carlo” by Andy Tagger as being something that your Uncle Joe would have released back in the day when every singer songwriter in every pub in the land was being hailed as the new messiah.
The songs on “Ponte Carlo” are straightforward, earnest and infused with no small amount of sentimentality yet there is also little doubt in my truly insignificant mind that Andy Tagger’s words are from the heart. He is not a poet and his blue collar motivations are described with the unmistakeable help of the rhyming thesaurus of life but does that really matter? It is hard to dislike these songs as they are so ordinary that they actually make the ordinary seem more rose tinted than the ordinary actually is.
I don’t know how long Andy Tagger has been at his game. The evidence presented in “Ponte Carlo” would suggest that he has been at it for a lot longer than yesterday and he will probably keep doing this sort of thing for much longer than tomorrow. And why not?