SHAKIN ALL OVER AGAIN

Even a heart attack in 2010 couldn’t deter Welsh rock’n’roll institution Shakin’ Stevens from returning to fight the good fight. Now, at 75, he has made another highly personal record that might confound those expecting him to fall back on the vintage covers and 50s stylings that made him such a ubiquitous presence on the 80s pop scene. “A lot of people are going to be shocked,” he warns Jack Watkins.

- Jack Watkins

In his boppin’, swayin’, finger-clickin’ heyday, serious music scribes had little time for Shakin’ Stevens. Reaching his commercial peak in an innovative era for British pop, he was a throwback to the days when solo singers ruled the charts and a recognisable voice was the passport to success. A rocker with a feel for melody, Stevens was a stylist in the classic mould, able to put a personal stamp on songs old or new, but reviewers were too sniffy to notice. Shaky’s old-school values were considered too safe for him to be recognised as the interesting misfit he really was. The hits kept coming, but critical acclaim never did.

His new album, Re-Set, is the latest in a concerted effort to present himself as an artist capable of creative progress. The first recognised benchmark of this desire “to move on,” as he likes to put it, was the Echoes Of Our Times album from 2016, though distribution and streaming issues meant it was probably not as widely heard as intended (it still made a respectable No 22 on the UK charts). That dark and highly personal effort, mainly built around new songs inspired by research into his family ancestry, was described by Richard Williams (in his Blue Moment blog) as “substantial enough to make posterity significantly modify its judgement of the nature and scale of his talent”.

Re-Set feels like a continuation of Shaky’s journey, though it’s taken a while to arrive. Work began on it the month before the first 2020 lockdown in long-time collaborator John David’s Berry Hill Studio in the Forest of Dean, before an enforced pause and immediate resumption in 2021. The spirit of