If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Coyne, first things first - he died in 2004, following a 30-year career as an inspirational singer-songwriter. He also had an interest in the work of the psychiatric charity Life and Living. Always an underground figure, the artists he has inspired are, if this CD is anything to go by, also of a more obscure nature. It’s also odd that for me, many of the tracks are unfamiliar - Coyne is to me, someone who recorded a landmark album Millionaires and Teddy Bears, and worked with Cherry Red around the same time. He also did several Peel Sessions and it’s here that Nikki Sudden may have heard ‘Marlene’, his choice to record (and which is the last recording by Sudden before he died) and which the former Swell Map makes his own. Other names crop up, fellow Map Jowe Head’s take on ‘My Evil Island Home’ is like Tom Waits on a Harpic and LSD gargle, former Finitribe/Revolting Cock Chris Connelly’s in singer, if not songwriter mode, and Alternative TV crop up for one of the more ‘rock’ takes on Coyne’s work, a guitars-out version of ‘Hello Judas’. The choices are odd, as is the fact that the CD doesn’t include tracks by former Mekons, these available only on the download version. Other ’bigger’ names include former Factory artist Kevin Hewick, while Jackie Leven, a friend of Coyne, offers the only non-KC song on the album, the closing ‘Urban Ravens’ which is a poignant and fitting close to a worthwhile and at times uplifting collection which shows off Coyne’s songwriting craft rather nicely.
//Bernhard Bessing