Silently Sparkling - Reviews Mornington Crescent Companion

The Mornington Crescent Companion

The fourth and final single My Life Story released on Mother Tongue records was a re-recording of 3 songs from the album Mornington Crescent and a cover version of a song by "Wire"

As Harry Blue (Bass) explains...
In response to increasing demands to hear My Life Story in a more intimate acoustic setting, these recordings were conceived.
By avoiding the elaboration and embellishment, we strip the songs down to their bare bones, leaving essential themes intact, like favourite old characters behaving in exciting new ways.
I invite you to join me in this aperitif to the banquet that is "Mornington Crescent"....indulge

Melody Maker's David Stubbs had this to say about The Mornington Crescent Companion...
Another despicably smug genre - antique market pub rock, made with real instruments and therefore by people more real than you or I could ever hope to be, sad electro-pop fan. Even the name Jake Shillingford is horribly redolent of a lost world - I suspect that, in a free vote Shillingford would vote for the return of the pre-decimal currency of pounds, shillings and pence. I can imagine them lapping this up in designer backstreet Islington pubs where the Old Speckled Hen is hand-pumped - all cellos and pianos and big savings on the electricity bill which is probably the only reason the landlord allows the f***ers to infest his premises.
It's a free country, My Life Story can play what they like - but I resent the implied notion that this has any actual worth. If I could herd My Life Story onto the next time machine heading back to the late 19th century - a truer, realer world of filth, disease, rickets, unwashed turnips and consumptive kids stuck halfway up chimneys - I would, just so's they could see what they're getting so dewy-eyed and wistful about. Heresy. Burn them, and their instruments. However, they do do a cover of Wire's "Outdoor Miner", albeit a rotten one, and so their death sentence is thus commuted to life imprisonment.

While Sylvia Patterson from the New Musical Express was only slightly more positive about it...
Three Tunes from the 'Mornington Crescent' LP in "piano quintet" arrangement ie, Jake 'The Flake' Shillingford quivering his tonsils over a grand piano and some strings played by persons pretending to blub into their cravats, no doubt. This is the sound of comedy mourning for pop dames in a tutu. It's rather lovely, too, even though Jake sings on 'Checkmate' "now the pawn takes queen" and not, as these ears hear, "now the porn dyke's Queen" which is a far more intriguing proposition. Plus! More Wire-invented-the-universe notions via a rendition of 'Outdoor Miner' where Jake puts his mouth where his adenoids are. It is, he says, "the Sunday morning to Mornington Crescent's Saturday night" but is nonetheless free of goths hailing an ambulance on a Camden pavement.

My Life Story on this recording are
Jake Shillingford: Voice Helen Caddick: Grand Piano, Voice Lucy Wilkins: Violin	Becki Doe: Violin Rob Spriggs: Viola Ollie Kraus: Cello

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