Neil Burrell - White Devil’s Day Is Almost Over

If Neil Burrell had a time machine, he’d surely whizz himself back to a big old hippie festival and sit around sharing the odd jazz cigarette or pot of mushroom tea with Syd Barrett and Nick Drake. You can easily imagine he’d deliberately throw a spanner in the works so he could never get back to the present day so brazenly are his 70s acoustic singer/songwriter influences worn on his sleeve.

Neil does a great line in - well, let’s call a spade a spade here - wackiness, shown to great (if a little acid-trip-gone-horribly-wrong) effect on the track ‘Wings Of A Fly’ (sample lyric: ‘Nobody knew the brake lights were/Made out of strawberry jam’). Wild and lurching oddities such as this aside, Neil’s guitar playing is always delicate, intricate and warm (especially on ‘Jagged Tongue’ which could be a Nirvana outtake from the ‘Nevermind’ sessions if hefty drums and bass were added). ‘Tangle Weed’ is stripped down to the absolute minimum - just Neil and his luscious acoustic trickery played with a heartachingly beautiful lightness of touch.

We salute Neil’s carefree loopiness, surreally imaginative mind and ability to cut off (so seemingly blissfully) from the past thirty-five years of music. Loads of people are aspiring eccentrics in the world of pop but we reckon Neil Burrell may actually have a legitimate claim to this much-coveted description. After all, can you name anyone else who has managed to cram in references to Oompa Loompas, talking fish and solid gold tins of Spam in one record recently?