John Holden from Cheshire in England is a prolific artist. Proximity & Chance is his fifth studio album (although you should add to that the Together Apart charity album he curated in 2021) since debut Capture Light in 2018. Kintsugi was one my favourite albums of 2022, and you can see my review of this by clicking on the button below. Ringing the Changes deservedly won my “pastoral track of 2022” in this website’s annual awards.
Following this, John was kind enough to do a detailed interview with the website, and you can see this by clicking again on the relevant button. It remains one of my favourite pieces of journalism here.
The new album has eight brand new pieces of music, and again a stellar cast to support an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist. I mention these in my discussion of each track below. The artwork on the CD is sumptuous, all designed by Holden, and a special mention to John’s wife, Elizabeth (Libby) who again collaborates with lyrics. You can get the CD at John’s website at https://johnholdenmusic.com/ and digitally at his Bandcamp page.
The stories are worthy of commentary on their own, so this is what I will do with my take on them, and following this, the music.
We start with 13, which tells the story of a dining club, The “Thirteen Club”, which was set up to debunk the superstition that to have thirteen people at a table was unlucky. The inaugural meeting was held on, yes you guessed it, a Friday 13th, at eight thirteen in the morning, and in Room 13 of a college. Diners would pass under a ladder, thus debunking another superstition. Five US Presidents were a part of this, and I believe that the whole wonderful idea was a solid way of influential people physically demonstrating to their compatriots that mankind had, indeed, moved into the age of reason, and away from the age of religious “myth” and superstition.
The Man Who Would Be King is taken from Rudyard Kipling, a story of colonialism (the Raj) and how two soldiers encourage mountain dwelling natives to believe they are gods. There are allusions here to Freemasonry, and, providing somewhat for an imaginative theme, claims Alexander the Great was a funny handshake merchant.
Burnt Cork & Limelight is about an English actor, and favourite of Queen Victoria, William Terriss, who was killed by an understudy, deranged, and sacked by him. The spurned actor, unemployed for ten years, after taking his revenge was committed to Broadmoor, England’s notorious hospital for the criminally insane, where he died forty years later. Rumour has it that the ghost of Terriss walks the Lanes of Brighton to this day.
Agents is all about the extraordinarily nasty, and infamous incident, when Russian agents at the behest of Putin tried to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a defector living in the tranquil English city of Salisbury, using the nerve agent, Novichok. He and his daughter survived, but there was an “innocent” fatality. The CD notes quite accurately inform us that the lack of any meaningful response from our government, shamefully, emboldened Putin and encouraged him to invade Ukraine illegally.
Fini, the story of a romantic weekend in Paris, but with a companion who is not the right person for you, and you end up being the loneliest person in supposedly the most romantic city on earth.
Proximity musically discusses the largest waterfall in the solar system, Echus Chasma, which is on……Mars. It existed over three billion years ago, and Mars is now a dried-out husk. Earth flourished with life. Our neighbour didn’t. The vagaries of scientific chance, eh?
And so, we close with Chance, the preceding track’s companion piece, and a story which puts into music something which has long fascinated this writer, so I will put it in my words. Let’s say a Dickson Lazenby (and this is a common name in the family history) married an Elizabeth Smith in 1799. They had children, and this tree continued until my father, Charles, met my mother, and produced my sister & I. Dickson met Elizabeth at a fair, let’s say, at a summer carnival the entire village looked forward to in a quiet corner of Yorkshire. However, what if, on that fateful day, Elizabeth had been struck with the influenza, and was too ill to travel the couple of miles to the fair? Dickson met Jane Trower instead and, well, Sarah & I would not be here. We would never have existed. The Order of the Universe as Jon Anderson put it so well. This is of course at the heart of some theories in quantum physics, an infinite number of possibilities in an infinite universe, and all we can do is look out into space and wonder at what could have been.
WILLIAM TERRISS
Okay, to the music, then. I can absolutely assure you, as you will hear from the tracks I have embedded, that it more than matches the tales I have described above.
The opener is the first to feature the voice of Pete Jones, so recognisable to all fans of modern intelligent music. The initial passage is bright and breezy, perhaps reflecting the optimism of the club. Jones when he enters provides us with his trademark expressive voice, rightly compared to Gabriel at his most thoughtful. The guitar solo provided at the close by Dave Brons is, as would be expected, wonderfully expressive. Holden provides us with some lovely bass melodies, and the voices provide us with an atmospheric delight. What a start.
The Man Who Would Be King features Shaun Holton, the new Southern Empire vocalist whose dramatic voice is suited so well to this piece, alongside some nice female harmonies, and the return to Holden duties of hugely impressive American musician, Vikram Shankar, who provides a synth solo full of mystic mystery. This is the longest track on the album, epic length at over ten and a half minutes, and is presaged by a suitably imperial trumpet from Moray Macdonald. The musical landscape provided to us by Holden is mystic, the mood and time of the empire perfectly encapsulated, but in such a clever modern fashion, with some of the orchestration taking the listener to another plane, taking the limelight some dextrous acoustic and electric guitar work. It is embedded below.
There is a gorgeous instrumental up next, A Sense of Place, which I have also embedded below. It was inspired by Mr & Mrs Holden’s visits to Veddw (here in West Wales, we would pronounce this vethoow), a garden in the beautiful SE Wales county of Monmouthshire. To give you a sense of the love they feel for the couple who continue to create this, which I must visit, the verse below is self-explanatory:
For man with hands of tempered might
Commands the wild to yield to light
In realms of harmony and grace
The old and new in close embrace
For in this Eden ordered neat
Strong hearts of iron and flame yet beat
And echo deep in ancient stone
A sense of place, a sacred stone
Sit back, turn the stereo up, close your eyes, and walk in the garden of musical expression alongside Holden with his guitar, John Hackett, our finest living flautist, and Shankar delicately providing a piano landscape. Simply beautiful, and Holden is in danger of repeating his pastoral track of the year winner at this year’s awards.
Burnt Cork and Limelight features Jones and Shankar again. Another epic track, just a tad over ten minutes long, Shankar’s piano is so dramatic, and it leads some marvellous orchestration, Holden really capturing the sense of the time, this when theatre provided entertainment to the masses, and the main players were the equivalent of our modern influencers. Jones does not need to remind us of just why he is in so much demand, but he does so here anyway, his voice perfectly playing out a story which is tragic, especially the murderer, Prince seeking out the treacherous Terriss, and the act itself is incredibly detailed, you can see the hunter and the hunted in your mind with some very clever programming especially. The passage of Prince in the asylum is desperately sad, Jones playing the part of the “leading man at last”. A track which really does cry out to be played in a real-life theatre. For the commercial restrictions on this, see my interview with John.
Agents has Holton returning on vocals, Jones on organ and sax, alongside one of the finest of the new generation of rock guitarists, Luke Machin, who I have been fortunate enough to meet a couple of times, and what a lovely man he is. Holton plays the part of the Russian agents planning their deadly plot so well, again a performance which should really be exposed to the general population in a live theatre environment, especially the exposure of the weakness of our authorities, much to our collective shame. Holden provides a pulsing bassline with some programming which ups the dramatic ante, with Machin giving us some gorgeous notes. Jones’s organ solo introduces us to an angry sax solo alongside some towering keyboards from Holden. Very impressive, a contender for epic of the year on this website and embedded below.
Fans of Holden will be familiar with the wonderful voice of regular collaborator, Sally Minnear, daughter of Kerry of Gentle Giant fame. Fini is a pretty, shorter, track, and my heart and mind melt at the sound of this voice, so expressive in its description of a love affair which never was, the protagonist left with merely memories and what might have been. A simply beautiful ballad which deserves far wider airplay.
Proximity evokes both the majesty of our nearest planetary neighbour, but also the loneliness we should all feel as the sole known receptacle of life, something which really should make us take a bit more care of our host. Musically comparable to the best of Vangelis, a nigh on perfect fusion of classical and rock music.
And so, to Chance (Under One Sun). Jones provides lead vocals, and he contributes to backing voices alongside Holton and Minnear. You might think me a wee bit strange (you would be right), but there is a hint to these ears of a playful tribute to Abba in the opening bars here (Mama Mia!), but if not deliberate, there is still a joyful feel to this song, and this is as it should be. We are made from the stars, and we are here by pure chance, so we should cherish every single moment. Pete puts this across so well, and the harmonies with his fellow vocalists are a progressive delight, alongside some deeply impressive musicianship, including an emotional Machin solo.
Under the Stars
This is my place
In infinite space
As someone who admires John Holden’s work, this special album merely serves to deepen my opinion that he is one of the most important and innovative of modern progressive artists. For those of you who are not familiar with his music, you really should be. A seriously impressive album which is pretty much essential.