Andy Pratt: SBP474133.

Reviewed by Chuck Wagon.

I was reading Bob Christgaw late last night and God, it's great to see that someone else hates the Eagles. I mean, hip capitalists we will always have among us, but do we really have to endure hip reactionaries that are as smug and fatuous as those boys? But just to show you that the brain of every whacked out rich hippie has not turned to mush, meet Andy Pratt.

You probably know him already; "Avenging Annie" is undoubtedly the greatest single of the seventies, a dazzling multi-level journey with Pretty Boy Floyd, the avenging angel, revenge fantasies, paranoia fantasies, liberation fantasies, sado-masochism fantasies and what not, woven into the perfect musical backing; if the Byrds die and go to heaven they'll probably put out singles that sound as good as "Avenging Annie". And the wonder is, it was a bigger hit in Wellington than anywhere else in the world!

The good news is that the LP is nearly as good. As an antidote to that Hollywood cow shit you get from the Eagles, try "Sittin' in the Moonlight", while on one channel Andy lisps out a slightly bent version of the usual Mother Nature drool ("stick your toe in the cool ocean water") on the other channel the other Andy Pratt is lisping things like "I'm gonna jump right out of here and stab you".

That's the thing about Andy; he's a little intense, a mite excessive. He's blessed with this banshee falsetto voice and he has a talent for writing love songs with lines like "and you ripped your fingers on the doorknob/walked straight into the TV/and said something which made everyone think you were really stupid". There's also another song about how when Andy can't make it with people he "gives it all to music" and it seems he hears "dark pianos" playing in his head all the time. I believe it. This one scores in all directions. Five stars for manic energy, five stars for the voice, five stars for the phenomenal over tracking and overdubbing, and five stars for somehow finding a completely unknown backing group. Roger Hawkins does not play drums on this record.

The bad news is that this gem has sold about three copies. So Phonogram will surely delete it. Remember what happened with the Armatrading LP?