
Head Michael And The Strands
The Magical World Of The Strands
Label: Megaphone Music
Genre: Rock / Pop
Availability
- LP €35.99 Out of Stock
Now comes with new gold foil embossed artwork.
After a couple of demos for the French promoter who paired him with his childhood hero Love’s Arthur Lee in 1992, Pale Fountains and Shack legend Michael Head entered a Liverpool recording studio the following year, with a new project in mind, ‘The Strands’. Michael teamed up with his brother and lifelong companion, John, his long-time drummer Iain Templeton and two new recruits, Michelle Brown on bass and Les Roberts on flute. The recording sessions would last two years and were only halted because Michael was offered a new major label deal. A deal, not for his current work, but for him to record as Shack again.
So it came to be that Stephane Bismuth, the French promoter, was left with 100 or so minutes of a thwarted project, only a third of which had made it to the mixing studio in Sheffield in the summer of ‘95.
Patch-working and weaving rough mixes and sketches – by engineer Steve Powell, made in Liverpool – with completed mixes by producer Mark Coyle who had hired an arranger and string section for sessions in Sheffield, Stephane Bismuth founded a new label Megaphone and finally released ‘The Magical World of The Strands’, in autumn of 1997.
5/5 lead two-page review in mojo: “shack's songwriting hero's romantic , opiated folk dream, restored and augmented with a companion album of unheard songs.
5/5 lead two-page review in q magazine: “scouse cult hero's magical moment revisited. That these are songs that feel a little more transcendent with every passing year is no mere conjecture.”
9/10 in uncut : “andmoreagain! A love-lorn masterpiece and its long-lost sibling”
Sunday times 'must-have reissue' “one of the 1990's great lost albums..MORE Redolent of summer-of-love san francisco than britpop merseyside...A Classic...”
Cream white viny;. Gatefold embossed cover.