Having carved himself a niche and a living – albeit meagre – relentlessly playing pub gigs up and down the country, Mark had successfully established himself as an accomplished blues-orientated musician of quality. His last album proper, ‘Stories, Rags and Songs’, showcased his natural talent for delicately crafted and astutely observed acoustic blued-based narrative-led songwriting.
He’s kicked it all in the head on the follow-up and continued the trajectory he began with the stop-gap digital-only live compilation ‘Singing Outta Tune In Bars (Some Poems & Some Songs)’ . Cheesed off with endlessly slogging for minimal returns and hacked off with the ageing process (well he is into his mid-twenties now!) he’s gone for broke and has taken to knocking out semi-improvised anecdotes and (semi-)autobiographical rambling musings. In short, it delivers pretty much what the title promises.
You can’t accuse Wynn of labouring over the material or overthinking it, and he certainly doesn’t bury the songs under lavish production and layers of multitracking: ‘First Takes’ is raggedy, warts and all, off the cuff, intentionally half-baked, and charming: utterly self-effacing and unpretentious, it’s the antithesis of, well, pretty much everything, although it is, arguably, tantamount to creative and commercial suicide. Like Mark gives a fuck about any of that.
With its spliced in-intro with an insanely lo-fi recording quality and ramshackle playing, ‘Love on the Buses’ sounds like pre-’Slanted and Enchanted’ Pavement or Silver Jews (I’m thinking of ‘The Arizona Record’ here) at first, with the throwaway lines ‘I was at home at my mum’s house / I went round there last night / had some food, nearly had a fuckin’ heart attack / never eaten so much food / she’s tryin’ to feed me up / doesn’t she realise my stomach is small?’ Then the song proper starts, and he recounts the time he picked up some bird and... well, the narrative’s pretty thin, and that’s the whole point. ‘First Takes’ is anti-art, a two-finger salute to all of the self-pitying, self-absorbed tortured genius singer-songwriters. It’s not about wearing his heart on his sleeve, moping or lyrical prowess: this is raw, gritty, earthy. Everything you’ve read about The Streets and Mike Skinner’s kitchen-sink microdramas applies to this collection, only in here, it’s true, it’s real – or made up on the spot (take, for example, the willfully vacuous ‘Short Song About Everything’ or the stubbornly mundane ‘Sunday Morning Mow the Lawn’) and it’s the product of a real hand-to-mouth busker’s existence.
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There are four unlisted live cuts at the end of the disc which capture Wynn performing in Brighton and on fine form, dispensing self-deprecating lyrical gems like ‘fuck me / I’m turning into my dad’, and ‘I’m 24, I’m alone, I’ve got no-one to keep me warm, I jack off three times a day’ and showcasing his inimitably awkward but extremely funny inter-song banter. But don’t think the tossed-off lyrics mean he’s given up altogether, and his musicianship is still appealingly fluid and fluent.
Whether or not ‘First Takes, Mistakes and a Selection of Exercises in Being a Bit Shit’ is an album you’d play regularly, or even revisit all that often isn’t really the point. Like the vagabond troubadour’s life, it’s a snapshot, a document of a period that’s here today and gone tomorrow as he’s on to the next town, and in context, it ‘does what it says on the tin’ as they say, and you can’t argue with that.
Mark Wynn Online
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