Great British Holiday EP's

Album review

Between 2005 and 2007, Darren Hayman issued a series of four limited-run four-song 7"s written and recorded at various English seaside vacation spots. Initiated as a small-scale, one-off project to distract him from the stress and creative constraints of a protracted legal battle with his former label, the results of the undertaking, collected here in a handsome edition with bonus tracks and a DVD of videos, stand not only as a touching tribute to the fading institution of the Great British Holiday, but as a testament to Hayman's status as one of pop's finest chroniclers of quintessential Englishness, in the tradition of Davies, Partridge, Haines, and Albarn. The whole package has a refreshingly off-the-cuff, homemade charm, from the rudimentary (though perfectly adequate) recordings, which rely primarily on ukuleles, drum machines, and the occasional cheap keyboard, to the simply shot videos, which offer a handy visual complement to the world evoked so touchingly in the songs. And the songs here are some of Hayman's best: most of them engaged with his familiar lyrical themes of the tenderly bittersweet love affairs of ordinary folks, but with a distinctly personal touch notable even in his idiosyncratic oeuvre, and shaded with a particular sense of poignancy and nostalgia. Several of the standouts focus specifically on the bygone era of Hayman's boyhood, including the technological regressionism of the peppy "8-Bit World," the wistful longing of "1976" (which rhymes "turquoise Formica" with "Twiggy or someone just like her"), and "Future Song"'s wry lament that "the future's not what they said it would be in the Sunday papers in the '70s/Where's my monorail, where's my hovercar, where's my robot slave?" For some tastes, the trio of covers added to the collection (of holiday-themed numbers by Connie Francis, Lindsey Buckingham, and Chas & Dave) may perhaps push things too far over the line into whimsy, though they capture a certain legitimate quaintness that's undeniably fitting. On the whole, though, it's hard not to be won over by the sweetness and intimacy of this project, which was clearly a labor of great love for its creator, and is one of the most delightful and illuminating ways to encounter his work.

© K. Ross Hoffman /TiVo