Twenty-three years from their inception, North Sea Radio Orchestra, the ever-shifting musical ensemble with a penchant for pastoral folk and contemporary classical compositions are still going strong, releasing ‘Special Powers’ at the end of May.
Lifted from the album, ‘All Alice Like’ is leader Craig Fortnam’s ‘attempt at ‘a country waltz. The band acknowledge that ‘while it does have a few psychedelic tinges and the odd unexpected chord, it is probably the most ‘straight-ahead’ tune he has ever written.’
With lyrics clearly inspired by the perennial classic that is ‘Alice in Wonderland’, it possesses dreamy, discombobulated quality:
Fell asleep for a week
Closed my eyes and I'm drifting on seas
In a boat on the wave........
(Closed my eyes and I drifted away)
I fell down the rabbit hole
All Alice like
Wide-awake
I’ve Nothing to fear by
Indeed, the rabbit hole metaphor has been strongly embraced as representative of the endless corridors of Internet researching – or, perhaps more accurately, the kind of random clicking from one place to another which many of us lost countless nights to at some time or another. I got particularly bad for it around the tune of the millennium, when I would sit till 4am, glassy-eyed racking up a devastating phone bill on my 1p-a-minute dialup, simply because… it was new and it was like nothing else I’d ever seen. The Internet is less fun and more adverts now, but random and epic journeys are still possible. But – of course, and appropriately – I digress.
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‘All Alice Like’ is gentle, with something of a sing-song melody that swishes this way and that, riding a tide of sweeping strings and graceful acoustic guitar. Combining elements of folk and chamber-music, with a certain indie-pop sensibility, North Sea Radio Orchestra demonstrate that they really do have ‘special powers’ when it comes to bringing together a host of stylistic elements in a seamless fashion.
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