The Yamaha Years

How to be happy in a sad sad world? It's deceptively simple. Why not "go to the Zoo/and say 'Boo' to an Ostrich?" suggests John Shuttleworth.

Former punk chartster Jilted John, aka Graham Fellows, has reinvented himself as the bastard love-child of Richard Stilgoe and Percy Sugden. A strokably soft Royston Vaisey without the diseased blackness, John might travel 500 bus-stops, but never gets beyond the end of his terrace. He hosts 'Radio Shuttleworth' but broadcasts it direct from his (virtual) front-room in some mythic time-lost ferret-breeding North of England that never existed. And he sings melancholic DIY dramas revolving around vacuum cleaners, pilchards in tomato sauce, Rennies, and his Y-reg Austin Ambassador. Like Manchester, he's got Strange-Ways.

For example, at its highest, most isolated point the trans-Pennine motorway bifurcates and a refusenik farmhouse is traffic islanded between lanes bathed in toxic lead-emissions and constant commuter-drone. It's there. I've seen it. And 'The Man Who Lives On The M62', the best of these twenty tracks, takes this symbol of grim heroism with its stoic edge of bleak quiet resilience, to represent the irony enclosing Fellows' artful caricature.

For the most part, with just a click-track and a cheap organ (never played too fast "like Matt Bianco") he's the walk-on link between Coronation Street and The League Of Gentlemen. Like a Polo mint his hole is greater than his parts. And this deceptively simple CD provides a couple more reasons to be Happy in a Sad Sad World...