Duckworth Lewis Method, The - Duckworth Lewis Method (The)

...adopted the moniker of The Duckworth Lewis Method (the name given to the formula used to calculate by how many runs England would have lost a one-day international match if it hadn't been cut short by rain) and stepped into the breach. Or strode up to the crease. Or something...and provided a collection of twelve tracks inspired by and ruminating upon our national summer sport (at least it is our summer sport in those rare summers where we temporarily ...
...1970s Dennis Lillee, and Mr Duckworth (Walsh) looking like Mike Gatting, the poor sod.

Novelty concept albums are a perilous thing to attempt: if you arse about with your 24 Carat Arseing About you run a terrible risk of delivering a one-joke one-note experience that even the most forgiving student is hiding at the back of his record collection before Freshers' Week is out. Wisely, Walsh and Hannon have had their fun in a serious fashion, ... more

I don't know about you, but I'm the sort of person who will lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, and just before sliding into my slumbers will contemplate the great enigmas that beset mankind. Can we not all just live in peace, tolerance and understanding? Is there a God? Is this all there is, and after this comes merely an inky blackness? And most important of all, why has there never been an album of songs about cricket done by two Irish blokes?

Well agonise about the latter no more, as Thomas Walsh and Neil Hannon have adopted the moniker of The Duckworth Lewis Method (the name given to the formula used to calculate by how many runs England would have lost a one-day international match if it hadn't been cut short by rain) and stepped into the breach. Or strode up to the crease. Or something...and provided a collection of twelve tracks inspired by and ruminating upon our national summer sport (at least it is our summer sport in those rare summers where we temporarily blag the Ashes back for eighteen months before getting stuffed in the one-dayers reminds us that the football season has started).

'I see Illingworth is relieving himself at the Pavilion End'

There have of course been songs associated with cricket before: the problem is, they've largely been useless. The great 10cc's all-time low point was the godawful clod-hopping 'I don't like cricket, I love it!' reggae pastiche of 'Dreadlock Holiday', while it's often forgotten that the bouncy-but-horrible Lou Bega dirge of 'Mambo No. 5' (that it went to no.1 here is bad enough, but apparently it topped the charts for TWENTY weeks in France...and they claim to be so cultured too) powered him to his 15 minutes of fame on the back of its usage as the theme to Channel 4's Test coverage.

That said, 'Soul Limbo' by Booker T And the MGs is bloody ace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67xXbTaQlKI

Anyway, I digress. Is there any valid artistic reason for a whole album about leather on willow? Well, it's often said (especially by sports fans, granted) that sport is a metaphor for life. And there can't be many sports that succeed as a life metaphor quite as snugly as cricket.

1) You can play it for bordering on an eternity and there's no guarantee that any of the concerned parties will win. Just like life.

2) Indeed, there's no guarantee that anything will happen at all. Ever. Just like life.

3) But it's the possibility that something might that keeps you interested. Just like life.

4) And a sizeable proportion of the population hate it with a passion. (Just like...y'know).

And does the Duckworth-Lewis Method explore such weighty themes? Of course it bloody well doesn't. What we have here is two clever songwriters indulging in what is commonly called '24 Carat Arseing About'...

'Fred Titmus has two short legs, one of them square'

The clever songwriters in question are Neil Hannon (a man who has spent the last 15 years being occasionally famous but mostly on and off the radar as The Divine Comedy) and Thomas Walsh (singer-songwriter with critically-beloved-but-largely-unknown-outside-of-their-immediate-families Dublin band Pugwash, whose line in densely melodic pop can be guessed by their recent signing to Andy 'XTC' Partridge's record label). They descend from the skies on the wondrously daft album cover, with Mr Lewis (Hannon) resembling the long-lost dwarf English cousin of the 1970s Dennis Lillee, and Mr Duckworth (Walsh) looking like Mike Gatting, the poor sod.

Novelty concept albums are a perilous thing to attempt: if you arse about with your 24 Carat Arseing About you run a terrible risk of delivering a one-joke one-note experience that even the most forgiving student is hiding at the back of his record collection before Freshers' Week is out. Wisely, Walsh and Hannon have had their fun in a serious fashion, realising that their ability to get away with this particular offence of murder is entirely dependent upon them concentrating on the 'songs' aspect of 'songs about cricket', and choose to make the album at least as much about covering a plethora of antiquaited pop tune stylings as it is about gloves, pads and boxes.

'Turner looks a bit shaky and unsteady, but I think he's going to bat on - one ball left'

1. The Coin Toss - We open with the sort of lush piano-drum thumping mini-overture than McCartney used to put on late Beatles albums. Lasting just a minute, Lewis wins the toss and decides to bat. Which is probably why he gets to sing the chorus on...

2. The Age of Revolution - ...the real opener, four minutes of historical perspective on the progression of cricket (a game whose history acutely mirrors the British Empire that spawned it, lest we forget) from game of the upper classes of England to one taken on by the colonial hoi-polloi of the Antipodes, the West Indies and the sub-continent, cleverly set to a music hall backing of faded trumpet and rat-a-tat percussion. Rather good fun, all told.

3. Gentlemen and Players - Forward to the Sixties (in terms of the Swinging London listen-to-the-flower-people sonic and vocal territory) while going back to the late Georgian period in terms of the subject matter (the early gentrified days of the game). 'To sweep, perchance to dream' indeed: archer than the western end of the Champs-Élysées.

4. The Sweet Spot - Which is, of course, the term for the point of contact on a sporting weapon with which one generates the maximum amount of power upon the object being struck. Hannon and Walsh seem to have noticed the word 'sweet' in the title, and taken it as licence to create a glam rock stomper that would have been right at home in the early to mid 70s. Awash with wordplay but slightly lacking in a chorus or a tune, it is probably the weakest track on the album, and with lyrics such as :-

I'm down on my knees just to please you all the time
When I hit the sweet spot I see it in your eyes

...erm, I nearly shrink from mentioning it, but might this song not actually be about cricket AT ALL?

5. Jiggery Pokery - Wherein Flanders & Swann jump in a time machine and arrive at Old Trafford in 1993 to comment upon the Shane Warne 'Ball of the Century' about which Mike Gatting probably still has nightmares. (The look of post-apocalyptic shock on his face as he walks off is a picture, but it could have been worse: I mean, Warne could have bowled him one of his fabled late-night text messages instead).

http://www.cricmotion.com/video/2577/Shane-Warne-Ball-of-the-Century

Sung from Gatting's point of view, the song is the kind of uniquely English concoction that has cropped up (with varying degrees of success) since the heyday of the afore-mentioned F&S and Noel Coward, and it's bloody tricky to pull off. Hannon and Walsh have managed it in fine style: solo piano and half spoken verse, jauntier chorus, a riot of internal rhymes and shoehorned syllables, the sort of thing that would make a Nuts reader's head explode. That said, the claim that 'if it had been a cheese roll it would never have got past me' seems slightly cruel given that a) Thomas Walsh is at least as cuddly as Gatting, and b) if it had been a cheese roll do you reckon Warne would have let go of it in the first place?

6. Mason on the Boundary - The two gents now leap from the skittish to the sublimely languid (in fact, just plain sublime). Inhabiting a musical landscape that's purest mid-tempo-Village-Green-Preservation-Society-Kinks-cum-Blur-Britpop-Ballad, the Mason of the title is the everyman of the crowd at the Sunday afternoon match, his ancestral home apparently in the shade of the trees just beyond the ropes, whatever tipple's his fancy in his hands. This really is a gorgeous tune, so gorgeous that you simply don't notice that Walsh and Hannon have dared to use the word 'panglossian' in a pop song. No wonder Stephen Fry practically melted his Twitter account praising this record.

7. Rain Stops Play - A chugging little instrumental opens the second half as the elements drive the players from the field. It's all over in 74 seconds, although if it were to truly signify how much time gets lost at domestic cricket matches to the weather it should probably consume most of the album with every other track a mere jingle.

8. Meeting Mr. Miandad - Seeing as this ludicrously jaunty and blatantly singalong number very strongly recalls the Divine Comedy's biggest hit 'National Express' it's kind of appropriate that it's about a trip in a camper van. Inspired by a dream, D & L are off to Pakistan to meet Ian Botham and Mike Gatting's legendary best mate. Despite the unconvincing climax to their wanderings (everything I've ever seen or read about the gentleman in question suggests that they were highly unlikely to be invited in for Pimms and cakes) it's a song that's almost impossible to dislike. And can two such eminent wordsmiths possibly come up with something that rhymes with 'Miandad'?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3JA-417V_M

That'll be 'no', then.

9. The Nightwatchman - And onward into darker territory, lush acoustic guitar, piano and strings melancholy of which Anthony Newley would have approved. It's only fleetingly about the lower-order batsman sent in late in the day at the fall of a wicket to protect a better player: the protagonist seems far less akin to Jimmy Anderson and Matthew Hoggard with their quirky hair fixation than he is to an obsessive stalker. Imagine the bloke in the Milk Tray adverts turned very very bad indeed.

10. Flatten the Hay - A possibly fanciful recollection of the summers of an Irish childhood (the only overt reference to the authors' homeland) is painted by a lovely piece of late-Sixties English (acoustic guitars, upright bass, harpsichords and flutes that are actually mellotrons) that Syd Barrett or Ray Davies might have come out with, if one's poison had been Guinness rather than acid, or if the other hadn't spent so much time in punch-ups with his brother. So, quite good then.

11. Test Match Special - A strangled and plodding piece of clockwork rural electric psychedelia paying tribute to one of the ultimate in English broadcasting institutions (as the song implies, in this day of Sky Sports and a ludicrous number of resulting viewing options still the best way to watch cricket on the box is to mute the telly and stick TMS on the radio). Another fine pop construction, only undone by its failure to mention cakes. I mean, nothing embodies TMS nearly so much as the cakes do.

12. The End of the Over - Finally, another McCartneyesque (with a Day-In-The-Life climactic piano chord to boot) ditty. And with that, as the song says...Duckworth and Lewis are out.

'There's Neil Harvey standing at leg slip with his legs wide apart, waiting for a tickle'

And at the end of the day's play, what do we have? It's an album with the potential to be loved or hated. You may adore the Duckworth Lewis Method for their ELO-style devotion to the appropriation of the musical styles they admire, and for the élan with which they execute them. (As an aside, it is also an album that rather handily raises the profile of its two architects: Mr Hannon (who has been mighty quiet of late, but has a new Divine Comedy album on the way and a musical he's trying to produce for the National Theatre, allegedly) reminds his public of his existence, and Mr Walsh (with Pugwash about to have an album released in England for the first time) gets introduced to an audience that might well be receptive to his art).

You may also hate them for how knowing and clever they are, but given the fact that they announced their break-up on September 4th (realistically the ruse could never have stretched to another record: Hannon shaved off his pastiche moustache that day to underline the point) even their detractors can end up loving them too. The experience is slightly patchy, but to pick up on their metaphors there aren't many half volleys here, and no wides. And the odd one that's smashed straight back over the bowler's head into the pavilion.

'Oh, stop it Aggers, please...'

Anyway, given the splendid pop music that makes up most of 'The Duckworth Lewis Method', possibly the most important question is 'does the listener really need to know about cricket to enjoy it?' I would argue not: great pop music is great pop music after all. It can be about anything that arouses the passion in you, and there's nothing in the rules that says that has to be an exclusively human object of desire.

And it's not like all those pitiable fools who bought Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' are expert in the precise consequences of filling out an organ donor card, is it?
 

...less