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Sir Richard Bishop, "Plays the Sun City Girls"
Recorded live at Newcastle upon Tyne’s intimate Morden Tower venue during his 2005 European tour, these two tracks are more radical rethinks than acoustic tributes. As one third of Sun City Girls, its Bishop’s obvious right to explore his own material, but these beautifully energetic takes seem utterly revitalised by anyone’s standards.
While still referencing the great ‘American primitive’ acoustic guitar players, both these instrumental cuts go far enough for me to place Bishop in that esteemed company. The audience going apeshit at the end of both songs is proof enough that Bishop is a player that has harnessed both incredible skill on the instrument and the ability to pump out an unbelievable amount of energy.
Both “Space Prophet Dogon” and “Esoterica of Abyssynia” contain passages of frenzied strumming that feel like solid blocks of heavy corrugated sound. These sections retain elements of gracefulness with the headlong percussive charges. His ability to unify virtuoso mastery of style, a straight up punchy playing and nimbleness that must’ve been something special to witness in that front room sized venue. “Space Prophet Dogon” blends an out-of-nowhere Irish folk sound into a mix of different genres that gathers splinters with every wrist twist and flourish.
This 7" is the first release from the NO-FI gig promotions outfit, and who better to archive their gig recordings than the people who put the effort into putting the shows on in the first place. These two songs thankfully don’t fulfil any terrible premonitions of Bishop trotting out the old hits as Sun City Girls Unplugged, but instead inspire both a looking forward and looking back.
