Dunfermline's RICHARD JOBSON is one of that circle of art intelligentsia/pop fiends who breathed significance into the Scottish indie air as the seventies matured and died into the 80s. His reputation is to have fallen off the parlour sideboard of good taste having been the singer on pop/punk favourite "Into the Valley". He went odd, while fellow SKID Stuart Adamson soared away into BIG COUNTRY. Unkind words can still be found, littering the public prints, bemoaning JOBSON's artifartiness.
But this CD does provide another faithful brick in the construction of a fabulous archive of all things Crepuscule. (JOBSON's experimental work came out through Cocteau and les Disques du Crepuscule between 1981 and 1988).
20 poems, read in JOBSON's untutored "poetry" voice are accompanied by some carefully played, but mainly uninspiring and derivative music from otherwise grand people like Vini Reilly, Steven Brown, Blaine L. Reininger, Wim Mertens and Virginia Astley. That's the 1982 "An Afternoon In Company". It includes a 14 minute tone poem of gentle music, with an occasional vocal from JOBSON. This is probably the best item on the CD.
"10.30 on a Summer Night" is a selection of passages from what sounds like a roughly hewn romance by French writer Marguerite Duras, who died in 1996. Either the translation is a bit suspect, or the writing isn’t quite as grand as Duras's awards and film accolades suggest. Some of it is excruciating. The accompanying music makes up for it to some extent. Cecile Bruynoghe plays lightly phrased piano, and various percussive effects (over?) dramatise the narrative. I have to report, in all honesty, that JOBSON is no public speaker. Rushes of urgency pulse through the text, almost at random. His dramatic weight shifts from syllable to syllable without much sense of purpose, and it really all is a bit silly. I don’t know many people who I could persuade to listen to this as patiently as I have done, blessed reader.
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But you must remember that I work in a Library, next to the Special Collections room, and I do revere the complete collection, perfectly preserved and well documented. This oddity is an essential part of such a work.
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