CD review #1: How I Learned to Love the Freaks

Oddly Peculiar but insightful indeed

How I Learned to Love the Freaks by Vinny Peculiar (Shadrack & Duxbury, 2023)

VINNY Peculiar is one of those jobbing musicians and fertile songwriting fonts who deserves more mainstream success but perhaps, as he reaches his 13th album in more than 20 years of gigging and recording, it seems he might be quite happy to pursue his idiosyncratic composing concerns, play regularly and bother not that much about the blaring – and often disruptive – trumpets of fame.

Peculiar, who is merely Alan Wilkes in the grey flow of civvy street, brings a splendid formula to his voluminous body of work: wit, whimsy and some cracking hooks and riffs. His writing is both knowing and naïve and his catchy three-minute creations suggest songs of worldliness and inexperience.

This is particularly evident on his just-unveiled long player How I Learned to Love the Freaks, in which he spins 10 new pop pieces and takes a time machine to a period he can barely have known personally but one he has the ability to evoke through sound and syllable on this most enjoyable record.

The album, by an English Midlander long since supplanted to the urban buzz of Manchester, suggests that late 1960s moment, betwixt the gossamer Summer of Love and the eventual mud bath of Woodstock, was constructed on cosmic hopes that promised much and eventually delivered all too little. Peculiar, with tongue often in cheek, nostalgically paints a psychedelic picture of the ecstatic highs and the pretty grim lows, zappy period soundscapes clothing his snappy stanzas.

The fact the latest sequence of originals commences with ‘Death of the Counterculture’ is a clear sign that this collection is no mere hollow eulogy to an era when the belief existed, particularly on the West Coast of America, that a cocktail of hallucinogenic drugs, free love and the end of his personal responsibility might forge a utopia and also bring the Vietnam War to an end as its bonus benefit.

The opener most certainly draws you in, suggesting the dreams and schemes of the Bay Area as the basso chimes of ‘Om’ pulse to a baroque spiral of electric guitar, and then a roll call of the star players unfolds in its quite hypnotic lyric – Dylan, Hendrix and Joni, Ginsberg and Cassady, Kerouac and Kesey appear – giving us a strong sense this work has ambitions beyond your everyday pop record, one with more than a little literary knowledge behind it.

The piece definitely brings to mind that friendly flashpoint when the tectonic plates of Beat and rock touched in 1965 when Dylan convened with the hip poets of the day – the so-called Last Gathering of the Beats – and was handed the baton to lead the countercultural parade, even if the songwriter proved profoundly reluctant to be the new Pied Piper of the social revolution.

‘Death of the Counterculture’ also weaves in multiple references to songs of the time – ‘hard rain’, ‘she said she said’ and ‘kick out the jams’ – fragments which immediately distil aspects of the age, from New York to Liverpool and Detroit, placing the song’s overview beyond the San Francisco city limits.

But there is no doubt that SF provides the lodestone, the mythical epicentre, of this smartly fabricated sonic journey. ‘Going to San Francisco’ tells a heightened personal tale of a traveller heading for the effervescent essence of the Golden Gate city, hitting the road on a Greyhound bus and wearing a poncho à la David Crosby to boot.

Yet some of the musical portraits here are more parochial. Peculiar has a kitchen sink method on many of his songs – he’s been compared to both Jarvis Cocker and the Mersey Poets and there are hints of Ray Davies and even Squeeze at times – and he applies this approach in smaller domestic visions: ‘Headshop’ and the title track, in which he confesses to some fleeting rumbles with local long hairs as a teenager.

By the close though, we are back to bigger pictures. ‘All Property is Theft’ not only quotes the radical thinking of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but also mentions Camus and Blake along the way and then the project signs off with a song called ‘Flower Power’.

This full-blooded tribute to one of the hippy movement’s guiding mantras, name checks Ginsberg again plus the Grateful Dead to finish the record on a determinedly positive note. The insistent vibrations of this upbeat anthem definitely prompts you to return the stylus to the very start of this always imaginative if essentially imaginary trip.

See also: ‘Interview #6: Vinny Peculiar’, April 27th, 2022