Blue Orchids - Magpie Heights (2024)

Martin Bramah, lead guitarist in The Fall, was the final original musician to leave the band and inarguably the most important factor in the band's original sound. His hazy psychedelic vision featured which so readily on The Fall's debut, Live At The Witch Trials, continued through his work with Blue Orchids with fellow Fall castaways Una Baines and Rick Goldstraw). Initial releases rose to notoriety with two caustic and intense 7" singles, The Flood and Work, along with their more varied, indie chart-topping debut LP, The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain). Personal issues within the band made progress difficult. The EP Agents Of Change, introduced changes to their sound (in part due to their work with Nico). But after its release, Bramah sightings were elusive - a solo on an album by Una's band The Fates, a 12" single with mesmerising songs performed, oddly, in a sort of reggae style. A short second stint in The Fall. A series of archival and new releases started up in 2015: a new studio album, followed by another new album nearly every year thereafter. This year's debut release by HOUSE Of ALL, a 'side project' featuring four other former members of The Fall, was a hit within days of its announcement, in no small part to its immediacy - recorded in three days - and a healthy dollop of scandal...the spectre of retrospective threat to MES's hegemonic rule of The Fall. Magpie Heights is an unexpected addition to Bramah's canon. The Face Of Time harkens back to the psych-garage of The Magical Record Of Blue Orchids, As My Vision Cleared makes a case for Bramah's unique stylistic sense within the realm of lysergic folk balladry, a kind of dark glam in Tableau Vivant . . . and seven other wonders.