String Driven Thing: String Driven Thing (Charisma 6369 923).

Reviewed by Richard Best.

Aside from The Mothers who cultivate bad looks. String Driven Thing take the prize for Ugliness. Forget the man with the hair and you got one guy with buck teeth and crossed eyes, another with monstrously thick eyebrows who'll be freaking the Roxy in 1975, and a woman you'd look twice at to see if you had her right. An unsympathetic society has kept these people home on Saturday nights and 'twas a good thing.

String Driven Thing make uncompromisinly electric music and if it all sounds a mite crazed at first hearing, it's cos you haven't beard anything New for that long.

SDT are English. Shel Talmy of Millie Small fame produced and they sound like the once potent Curved Air might and should have been. Fragile folk and when you start dismissing it all as acoustic neuroses — a snatch of neo-classical violin that kinda jolts you.

"Circus" is one of those maniac English folk songs scratching on confusion: Take me to the circus/I wanna see the lion/l wanna sec the tiger In a Jefferson Airplane influence "My Real Hero", it's a Seatrain violin and: Who's feeling who? and God doesn't play in a rock 'n roll band.

It's pretty shaky stuff and nobody'll make it a staple in any day in the life. It makes a change though and if they weren't so goddamn ugly they'd beat the pants off Fairport Convention.