Name: My Beautiful England
Brand: David Westlake

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

PICI0038LP

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-10-14

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cargo

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

76625972756

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

PICI0038CD

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76625972749

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "76625972749"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

David Westlake

Genre GB

Alternative / Modern

Label GB

Tiny Global Productions

We love nothing more than belated success, from the Nightingales' rise to top cult band, to the string of five marvellous Blue Orchids LPs in six years (as much as Martin Bramah had managed in the previous four decades) . . . so give us more. Like David Westlake. The release of NME's C86 cassette heralded a new generation of artists who'd emerged since the preceding C81 assembled a set of acts who'd coaxed new dialects out of punk, rhythms, reggae and the avant-garde.

Though variable, C86 became a phenomenon, making a bigger splash and enduring longer than anyone could have predicted. The evolution by 1986 of "independent" or "alternative" music into "indie" brought a modified focus. From C81's post-punk negotiations of politics and cross-cultural influence to C86's compact blasts of, on the one hand, effervescent melodic pop and, on the other, jagged Beefheart-esque racket. 

Tiny Global Productions has proudly presented already one of the best from C86. The Wolfhounds' leader David Callahan's talent evolved masterfully into Moonshake, and more recently to a strain of blistering raga-folk psychedelia which deals with sociopolitical issues in brilliantly idiosyncratic fashion. And what of another of the best from C86 - the Servants, David Westlake's band? Ambivalent about the invitation to be on C86, Westlake gave the NME a wrong-footing b-side, before keeping a distance from the noise around the compilation. 

Subsequent releases from Westlake and The Servants and Westlake attracted fine reviews but settled quietly into relative obscurity, despite musical involvement from various Housemartins, Go-Betweens and Triffids, a quest by Stuart from Belle &amp; Sebastian to find Westlake and form a band; not to mention Luke Haines' own five-year presence in the Servants before forming The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder. 

Westlake went first into the law, then spent years in literary academia. Now the surprise arrival of <i>My Beautiful England</i>. The album is a masterpiece of concept, composition and performance, a conceptual work of truths and reflections of difficult but deft and unflinching expression. "It is not only fashionable now to denigrate England and its past; it is heresy to recognise good in it. The place that made me is disappearing. Its values and traditions. Among them: good manners, humility and clemency, resilience and perseverance, good humour. 

History is being refashioned – in spirit and material fact – by ideologues unshakeably certain they are in the right, and people are being distanced from their pasts. Some find themselves forced into passive acceptance of new distortions of the past, out of imitativeness or cowardice. I resist. This album is a memorial. Intentionally, a museum piece. It is a personal tribute to the England I knew."