Camberwell Now

All's Well (1992) ...

Group formed by Charles Hayward of This Heat... This album is a compilation of most of their releases ...

Daddy Needs a Throne ... originally released on Touch cassette Ritual ...

The songs - nostalgic, scary, quietly desperate - peer into the future to find harbour but confront only fragments of ruin. Debris and disturbance eat away at the root and corrode each shiny surface (this is mostly the musical work of the cassette switchboard). The juxtaposition of powerful, virtuosic playing and the eerie, often unidentifiable keenings, chords and constant motion of the cassettes is one of the things that make Camberwell Now so expressive of its time - when the whole social and political fabric of a no-longer-great Britain was unravelling... rermegacorp.com ...

Working Nights ...

 
Speculative Fiction ... from the album Ghost Trade ...

Following groundbreaking work with Quiet Sun and This Heat, the '70s the '80s saw Haward's songs developing in a direction not dissimilar to those of Robert Wyatt of the same early-'80s period. That is, a highly intellectual, experimental rock music that, while it has roots in the avant-garde, it relates directly to the British folk traditional song. Charles Hayward's later solo work started to return to the abstract with Survive the Gesture, Skew-Whiff, and Switch On War. These experimental and improvised albums, plus the posthumous attention This Heat received in the '90s, may have shrouded Charles Hayward's extraordinary songwriting skills, which are displayed here in their most focused and pure form... allmusic.com ...

Green Fingers ... 


factmag.com review of The Ghost Trade ...