#11 The Fallen By Watchbird - Jane Weaver

Ol' Jane and me, we go way back. Back to before the worldwide web was much of a thing at all. The best way I knew back then to find new music was go tramping round record stores in my lunch hour, pawing through the bargain bins. Of course, back then there were record stores.

That's where I first came across ol' Jane Weaver, only of course I didn't know then that's who she was. I picked up these two singles by Kill Laura because there's a name you don't pass up or not for a pound a piece you don't, anyway. I got them home and played them and they were good. They were better than good. Here, have a listen for yourself.

Now, that's a chord progression. Sure, it's the Velvet Underground's chord progression, but it's not what you steal it's what you do with it, isn't it? And then there's the fuzz and the crackle and the voice. That voice.

So after that I bought all of ol' Jane's stuff I could get my hands on and I kept on buying it. All the Kill Laura. All the Misty Dixon. (We'll get to them). All the Jane Weaver. 

So many Jane Weaver albums, I have. When I was doing this list I piled them all up and they stacked higher than almost anyone's except Lloyd Cole's. Who knew? 

Who cared? Not many. Here's ol' Jane in 2006, sitting on a plastic chair in a field somewhere. There she was, knocking out classics, one after another, all those years. They could all be on this list. No-one wanted to know.

Yeah, well, they love ol' Jane now, don't they? All she had to do was turn herself into a one-woman Hawkwind then throw in a bit of Can for credibility. Literally, with Malcolm Mooney on guest vocals.

All that came later and I love those records, The Silver Globe, Loops in the Secret Society, Modern Kosmology. The motorik. The merciless drive. But I love the faery lilt of the early ones, too, Seven Day Smile, Cherlokolate, any of them, all of them, they could all be on this list.

I had to pick and I picked The Fallen by Watchbird. It's the transitional shift from psychfolk to krautrock. It's prog, come on, let's own it. Psych prog, folk prog, prog punk, twist it how you want there's prog in it, at the core.

Ffs, that makes two prog albums on this list, with the Ultrasound. You think you grow up but you don't, not really.

What's it about, this album, then, with the funny name? Search me. Ask ol' Jane, I guess. There's a story in there at the back of it, just like there would be in a Gentle Giant album, I'm sure of that. 

There must be. There's a book. Oh yes, there's a book. I bought it. I tried to read it but I didn't get far. I didn't get far at all.

I'll stick with the songs. The songs are superb. Better than the later stuff everyone loves. The stuff that sells and fills halls and gets on TV and into the pages of the quality press. Not that that stuff's not great, too. It really is. It may even be better. But this is the one I remember.

This one and Misty Dixon but we'll get to that.

All in good time.