WESTLAKE, DAVID - My Beautiful England

"The release of NME's C86 cassette heralded a new generation of artists who'd emerged since the preceding C81 assembled a set of acts who'd coaxed new dialects out of punk, rhythms, reggae and the avant-garde. What of another of the best from C86 -- the Servants, David Westlake's band Ambivalent about the invitation to be on C86, Westlake gave the NME a wrong-footing B-side, before keeping a distance from the noise around the compilation. Subsequent releases from Westlake and The Servants and Westlake attracted fine reviews but settled quietly into relative obscurity, despite musical involvement from various Housemartins, Go-Betweens, and Triffids, a quest by Stuart from Belle & Sebastian to find Westlake and form a band; not to mention Luke Haines's own five-year presence in the Servants before forming The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof, and Black Box Recorder. Westlake went first into the law, then spent years in literary academia. Now the surprise arrival of My Beautiful England. The album is a masterpiece of concept, composition and performance, a conceptual work of truths and reflections of difficult but deft and unflinching expression. "It is not only fashionable now to denigrate England and its past; it is heresy to recognize good in it. The place that made me is disappearing. Its values and traditions. Among them: good manners, humility and clemency, resilience and perseverance, good humor. History is being refashioned -- in spirit and material fact -- by ideologues unshakably certain they are in the right, and people are being distanced from their pasts. Some find themselves forced into passive acceptance of new distortions of the past, out of imitativeness or cowardice. I resist. This album is a memorial. Intentionally, a museum piece. It is a personal tribute to the England I knew."" - Tiny Global Productions .