MICHAEL Head is the musical equivalent of all those Liverpool players who never quite filled Kenny Dalglish's god-like number 7 shirt, from Dean Saunders to Harry Kewell to Robbie Keane.

So many Liverpool bands have done better than Head's bands The Pale Fountains, Shack and The Strands, but unlike the Kop flops, Head's songs live on for another day, a Head re-start.

Only Lee Mavers and The La's have lived off so much Scouse unfulfilled promise, but at least Head has made plenty of records and is doing so again with The Red Elastic Band.

His "lost" 1997 album The Magical World Of The Strands – essentially Michael and brother John on leave from Shack – has been reissued this summer by Megaphone with new liner notes by Head and the B-sides to the lonesome, lovely but desperate stand-out Somethin' Like You.

Strings and woodwind echo Nick Drake; an American breeze cools songs drawn from heroin addiction and self-destructive love.

New collection The Olde Worlde finds more wounded wonder in relics from the same sessions. Head this way.

Charles Hutchinson