“Anything you do, I did before/I did it all before you, and so much more,” drawls Holly Golightly (her real name), and she’s not wrong: she befriended art-punk maverick Billy Childish as a teenager, co-founded cult garage band Thee Headcoatees (a ‘splinter group’ of Childish’s Thee Headcoats) and has released ten solo albums and at least as many singles since 1995. Latterly, it’s her twanging caterwaul you hear playfighting with Jack and Meg on the Stripes’ ‘It’s True That We Love One Another’.
Her first post-Stripes long-player proves she’s more than just another ten-a-penny Friend Of Jack White’s, however. Fusing old-style Memphis country pop, British Invasion skiffle and Brill Building girl-group pop perfection, and possessed of that odd quality of flirting innocence with a dark undertow that all the best ’60s girl groups had, this is what Owen Bradley demoing The Shangri-La’s on the cheap, with Ray and Dave Davies heading up the backing band, might have
sounded like.
But the secret weapon is Holly’s voice, a dry, unadorned shout that recalls flinty, take-no-shit old-country divas Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells – and wisely, it’s recorded as such, with plenty of that metallic, over-the-top, early-’60s reverb, on what sounds like a 50-year-old mic. It does the stroll through the sidling Patsy Cline torch-and-twang of ‘Walk A Mile (In My Shoes)’; it ensures that the hormonal, jerking punch and thigh-slapping tambourine come-on of obscure Kinks cover ‘Time Will Tell’ are utterly her own; and it drapes itself across the drowsing upright-bass-and-cardboard-guitar front-porch laze of Charles Brown cover ‘Black Night’ like a straggly vagabond cat stretching in the sun.
Best of all is ‘One Neck’, a toppy, sizzling, chiffon-and-death-letters Shangri La’s-style slow-boiler taken at funeral-procession speed, involving a man what done her wrong and his new flame. “If they only had one neck/ I’d tie my rope around it,” she rasps over a tangle of barbed Velvets guitars and the faraway moan of girl-group keening. Truly, Holly Golightly has arrived – even if she’s really been there all along.