NIC Armstrong is a 24-year-old displaced Geordie who went to Nottingham to study Fine Art. Instead he mastered the not-so-fine art of mimicking the first wave of British Sixties pop.
You could call him the Tom Keating of the retro wave of singer-songwriters, such is the authenticity of his lovingly crafted faux works, and no doubt that accounts for the title of his debut album, The Greatest White Liar. Where The Rutles did their pastiche with humour, Armstrong prefers a sense of traditionalist wonder in his aping of the amphetamine-sparked Beatles in Hamburg and his rush at the smoky pub blues of Manfred Mann, the Stones and Eric Burdon's Animals.
Yet judged against the cream of the past, these are skimmed rather than gold-top tunes for a milkman's whistling repertoire.
Glaswegian Daniel Wylie is stuck in a Sixties groove too, in his case the later-Sixties psychedelia of West Coast America that so fixates Scottish bands. Wylie parted company - amicably - with the Cosmic Rough Riders after four albums, and the self-produced Ramshackle Beauty is in the same vein, all sunshine harmonies and wistful melodies and lovely, rainbow-chasing love songs. So, why did he leave his Cosmic compadres?
Updated: 09:32 Thursday, April 29, 2004
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