The Lakeside Sessions, Vol. 2 (A Dream of Fair Women)

Resuming a career that had ground to a standstill 25 years earlier, Pete Atkin — energized by the sudden Internet-generated renewal of interest in his music — unexpectedly unleashed a veritable torrent of material mostly written for what would have been his seventh album, but for the intervention of punk. This time, however, there would be no big-league record company to mess it up. The two albums that comprise The Lakeside Sessions — initially released individually as History and Geography and A Dream of Fair Women — were recorded and released under the auspices of Atkin's own label, Hillside Music. And though the budget didn't run to the kind of top-notch session musicians and occasional orchestrations of his RCA output, the enforced intimacy of the arrangements mostly suited the material. Although most of the songs dated back to the mid-'70s (some even earlier), there had also been a subtle evolution in Atkin's style of delivery over the intervening years. Gone, mostly, was the acoustic guitar that landed his records in many stores' folk sections, to be replaced by electric piano and an altogether jazzier feel. Only the occasionally jarring use of synthetic strings smacks of budgetary constraint. As for the songs themselves — though the usual caveat about double albums applies — there are enough crackers to suggest that the album after 1975's disappointing sign-off, Live Libel, would have been one of Atkin's best. Certainly there was no evidence to suggest that lyricist Clive James was any less determined to expand the horizons of the humble pop song. "Canoe," for instance, begins with three native huntsmen navigating home by the stars before fast-forwarding hundreds of years to three astronauts reentering the earth's atmosphere. "Urban Guerilla" — with its untypical but startlingly effective use of synthesizers — takes the view of a freedom fighter whose world is about to cave in on him, while "Search and Destroy" tells the story of the Resurrection in the hard-bitten language of a GI's report: breathtakingly ambitious by rock standards, and with memorable settings to match. In amongst all the old songs contained in what was essentially a mopping-up operation were a few unannounced new compositions — notably "I Feel Like Midnight" — that suggested there was mileage yet in the Atkin-James partnership, and foreshadowed Winter/Spring, the pair's first album of all-new material since 1974's Secret Drinker. That album, however, ushered in a whole new approach to lyric writing, leaving The Lakeside Sessions as the last recorded example of a style that divided critics and listeners so bitterly between those who regarded it as the fullest flowering of the rock lyricist's art and those who found it merely wordy and self-satisfied.