SHACK: 'TIME MACHINE' - The best of Shack. /b(Sour Mash/Big Brother Recordings)
On 24th September 2007 Shack release 'Time Machine': a collection of their greatest songs.
The album contains songs from their five acclaimed releases, as well as two brand new tracks.
Track listing:
I Know You Well
Comedy
Cup Of Tea
Al's Vacation
Pull Together
Meant To Be
Butterfly
Sgt. Major
On the Terrace
Undecided
Cornish Town
Miles Apart
Streets of Kenny
Shelley Brown
Neighbours
* plus brand new tracks 'Holiday Abroad' and 'Wanda'.
A live tour will accompany the release of 'Time Machine' with dates to be announced.
'Time Machine' is an appropriate name for a 'best of' Shack: for a band whose music is time-less, grounded in nothing but a purity of spirit and melody. Since Shack formed in 1988 they have charmed bleary-eyed romantics, inspired critical praise at every turn and enthused a generation of contemporary heroes - Oasis, The Coral and The Zutons amongst them. Noel Gallagher loved them so much he now releases their records. Shack have always captured the sound of "truth and beauty".
Shack's tenure as auteurs of 'truth and beauty' has literally careered - often from one seeming disaster to fortuitous event and all points in between. Formed out of the remnants of 80s should-have-beens The Pale Fountains, the Scouse brothers Mick and John Head set out on a saga of near-biblical proportions infused with the spirit of melody and mysticism captured by fellow star sailors Love, Nick Drake, Tim Buckley, Sly & The Family Stone, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Harry Nilsson and The Beatles. Shack albums are equal parts psychedelia, honesty, storytelling, love lost, love found and light and shade. So it was that the master tapes for their embarrassingly staggering 'Waterpistol' album were lost, the record label went bust and the studio burnt down; but the world evidently needed this record and eventually this masterpiece of understatement came out in 1994. Waterpistol lends 'Neighbours', 'Sgt Major' and 'Undecided' to 'Time Machine'.
A leisurely seven years later (during which time the band became the backing band for the late Arthur Lee's Love for a while - true hero worship and kindred spirits joining forces) Shack re-emerged as The Strands. and introduced a small but feverish group of Head-heads to 'their The Magical World.' A veritable blink of an eye in Shack-time passed before 'HMS Fable' docked - an almost-mainstream vision of life from the narcotic fringes of what Mick calls "states of consciousness". 'Pull Together', 'Comedy', 'Streets Of Kenny' and 'Cornish Town' are taken from 'HMS Fable'
Two more memorable albums have followed: 'Here's Tom With the Weather' (2003) and '.The Corner of Miles and Gil' (2006). These additions to Shack's peerless collection are full of funny and forlorn tales of love, friendship and the spectrum of human experience; Mick a life-long storytelling natural who grew up, as did John, on the hard-knock housing estate of Kensington ('Kenny') in Liverpool, with his head both lost in the clouds and buried among the pages of Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Wordsworth.
All the while, Shack have been making some of the most beautiful music ever created by soul men gifted in melody. Almost 20 years since their immaculate conception, Shack are still here, still intact and still in love with truth and beauty.
"The journey we've had together has been beautifully turbulent," laughed John in 2003. "But there's times when we glide and we're gliding forward now." His brother, typically understated, summed up the Shack experience. "The story is what it is. But so are the songs and so are the records. Because?we're good."
Better than good: With Shack's 'Time Machine' you can discover for yourself.
