CAMBERWELL NOW - Alls Well

The complete works of this post-This Heat band featuring Charles Hayward, recorded 1982-1986. Featuring these original releases: Meridian, The Ghost Trade & Greenfingers LP/EPs. "This definitive edition collects the entire released output of Camberwell Now (two EPs and an LP), newly re-mastered by the band and repackaged with full notes, lyrics, additional photographs and artwork. Chronologically, Camberwell Now immediately succeeded This Heat, Charles Hayward continuing to work with This Heats last bassist Trefor Goronwy, and the two of them joining forces with Stephen Rickard who, for the new band, designed his unique cassette switchboard, a kind of proto-sampler -- though thats not the half of it (Steves article fully explaining the device is reprinted in the new, expanded booklet that comes with the CD). Musically, Camberwell both followed and departed from the style of This Heat. Formally and gesturally there are common elements, but there is far greater transparency and the sound palette is quite different: the music is more placed than grown, as the slow accumulation and evolution of material in This Heat gives way to a more immediate and orderly development of the material in Camberwell Now. The songs -- nostalgic, scary, and quietly desperate -- peer into the future to find harbour but confront only fragments of ruin. Debris and disturbance eat away at the root and corrode each shiny surface (mostly the musical work of the cassette switchboard). The juxtaposition of powerful, virtuosic playing and the eerie, often unidentifiable keenings, chords and constant motion of the cassettes is one of the things that make Camberwell Now so expressive of its time -- when the whole social and political fabric of a no-longer-great Britain was unravelling. Camberwell Now worked and recorded in Cold Storage, and toured intermittently through Europe between 1983 and 1986, when they disbanded." - Recommended