Guy Blackman - Adult Baby LP

Guy Blackman - Adult Baby LP (Pop Superette/France + Chapter/Australia)

Quiet is the new LAUD - the man behind chapter music is also an indie pop genius for fans of Kings of Convenience, Jose Gonzalez, Badly Drawn Boy, and Belle and Sebastian.

If a Pop Supérette manifesto existed, its opening pages would surely read “the label that has nothing against 33rpm albums as long as they only contain hits”. Now, here’s a perfect illustration: Guy Blackman’s “Adult Baby”, a brilliant debut LP whose title refers to Brian Wilson’s “Adult Child” aborted project, albeit musically quite different in content. Rather than delivering nothing but hits, this album delivers nothing but songs perfectly suited to double A-side 45rpm singles (well, like those in the pink heydays of Island Records by Nick Drake, Duncan Browne, John Cale, or Kevin Ayers). Blackman’s output is in no way a seventies revival, tho’; he’s very much of his time, as evidenced by the wonderful showpiece “Gayle”, all white stiffness despite the funky brass arrangements.

Assembled like a diary, like many records of today, the album “Adult Baby”, unlike them, was worked on and reworked over a long period, involving so many musicians that it would be impossible to make it a grant-funded project, even in France! Guy Blackman doesn’t mind as his approach is clearly obsessive, where every arrangement seems to have been considered at length, no doubt rejecting the argument that weaker passages are part of the artistic work (one of the DIY tragedies).

By the way, who is Guy Blackman? Record shops may know him as one of the two driving forces behind Chapter Music (The Goon Sax etc.), one of Australia’s longest-running indie labels, which he founded in 1992 at the age of 17, and runs with Ben O’Connor, his partner in music and life. Guy Blackman is also known to be a nerdy fan of Syd Barrett, to whom he dedicated a fanzine in his teenage days, just before launching the label. With his very distinctive, haunting Brechtian voice (which might remind listeners of Nico), superior songwriting and delicate arrangements, “Adult Baby” is dear to all those who know it. How this little gem reached us in our hometown of Toulouse, France, seems a little nebulous today. Perhaps thanks to Stéphane of 2000 Records, or Julien Gasc, one of the artists on his label at the time. In all likelihood, it was thanks to Le Superhomard’s baritone Maxwell Farrington, an Aussie citizen exiled in Toulouse for a few years, that this album has made its way into the in-the-know circle, assuming a lost classic status, the “barely released, barely forgotten” kind, joining the ranks of must-have productions, sadly passed under the radar.

Maxwell Farrington: “Guy Blackman is one of Australia’s finest singer/songwriters. There are very, very few artists who can make me cry like he does. Normally I don’t give a damn about the lyrics, but with him it’s genius. After his moving (unpretentious) words come his graceful and sticky melodies and arrangements. ‘Adult Baby’ - this is a very important album for me, it’s the Mount Everest of Australian pop.”
Never released on vinyl, Pop Supérette, in association with Chapter Music, is reissuing this album originally published in CD format in 2008 by Unstable Ape Records. It includes, as a bonus track, a sublime rendition of Gene Clark’s “Echoes”, recorded around the same time.