Too Close To Heaven

History – and a succession of box sets – has taught us to be wary of the ‘unreleased’ session. Some things are just best left on the cutting room floor. The tracks on Too Close To Heaven are taken from the reputed forty unused songs from 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues recordings and, it has to be said, were probably best left were they were. The original’s folk, blues and gospel influences are all very much in evidence, but this time it’s just way, way too much. The title track weighs in at a wearing twelve and a half minutes – ‘Blues For Your Baby’, ‘Custer’s Blues’ and ‘Lonesome Old Wind’ are as grim as their titles suggest.

Thistlewaite and Wickham do their best to salvage the situation through some inspired playing, but even they cannot rise above Mike Scott’s overblown meanderings.

Fisherman’s Blues was an album of its own moment and succeeded on those terms, Too Close To Heaven just sounds horribly behind the times.