Track 1, If I Were a Runway Model, is promising and pleasant enough until moving into dreamier areas at 5'30. There is an element of folk to its otherwise ambient, Brian Eno style and if one imagines his Another Green World, the theme music from Arena on the telly, you won't be far away.
But track 1 shifts into something much more suspiciously New Age, not that New Age is 'new' anymore, being almost as old as 1970's avant-garde.
Track 2, though, Robbie's Song, errs just on the right side of muzak, building in sustained fashion to something quite stirring. But from track 3 onwards, it begins to struggle. Are we hearing suggested whale songs, are we being asked to get in touch with our mystical side. We have been led into dodgy territory and perhaps that somnolent condition early on Sunday mornings was a time to be caught unawares, when Albinoni could be trusted but one's sharper critical faculties are open to invasion from less rigorous music. Peter Broderick doesn't so much compose music as compile it from his synthesized box of tricks.
Perhaps in 1972, not having got beyond Tangerine Dream, I'd have believed in this atmospheric doodling but I'm not such a soft touch now, I'd like to think. If William Byrd or Palestrina can evoke eternity but their pieces finish all too soon, track 3 does a similar thing only you wish it would. It is music for old rope.
I can see why I fell for track 5. Not entirely my fault. It made me think of Piano Circus, who I'm glad to look up and see are still at it and not all by now pursuing careers in accountancy. I must catch up with what they've been doing. And you still haven't entirely given up the ghost with track 6, somehow redolent of traditional Gaelic music.
Maybe all is not lost. But once we get to Unsung Heroes, the finale,
And now, as I sit by the Hawthorn tree
Listening to the Universal
Language
oh, for heaven's sake, he's blown it. It's as if he almost got away with it under strict interrogation and then broke down and had to admit he was guilty.
The first time I played it, I eventually couldn't wait for it to finish and now the same thing is happening for a third time.
I'm ever so sorry because I like to try to find the worthwhile in things if it's there and, until he recently became more desperate, even did so with Jacob Rees-Mogg. But whereas he is cartoon ludicrous Tory, Peter Broderick hasn't edited out anywhere near enough to disguise himself as another Brian Eno and this is ultimately New Age and gets drearier the less excuses you make for it.
I must be more careful.