Album review: BILLY MACKENZIE – Satellite Life Recordings 1995-96, 3 CD Set

Cherry Red Records [Release date: 23.04.22]

Billy MacKenzie died in 1997, aged 39.

Beyond the band he founded with Alan Rankine, The Associates, he recorded a handful of solo albums, but many of the songs in those studio sessions didn’t see the light of day until now.

The Satellite Life Recordings, a 3 CD Boxset, is a fabulous collection of Mackenzie’s music, rich in content, dark in tone, always passionate, frequently dramatic and sometimes painful.

Author Carole Morin said this, after the artist’s death: “It’s the duality of glamour and spirituality in his voice that attracts me. His toughness and fragility; darkness and laughter.”

There is probably no better summation of the man.

Some of these songs come from older material, now reworked by MacKenzie’s latter day collaborator, Steve Aungle. Some come from those studio sessions mentioned above, songs that were subsequently shelved. All within the years 1995-1996.

MacKenzie’s operatic style and high tenor voice wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but he had soul, he had style, musically he had no fear and his vocals never lacked conviction.

From the elegantly poised opening track, ‘Sing That Song Again’s classy piano intro, and the graceful ballad, ‘And This She Knows’ on Disc 1, to the Roxy Music gone techno of ‘Your Own Fire’ and the stagey simplicity of ’14 Mirrors’ on Disc 3, the music at the beginning and the end of this collection has an incredibly strong but deceptively mellow sense of equilibrium.

In its own way, it provides the entrance and exit to a musical labyrinth which runs through the 3 CD set. It’s hard to see your way sometimes. We find beauty and surrealism mingling and mixing on songs as different as the drum & bass electronica of ‘Hornophobic’ and the primarily instrumental, primitive techno of ’14th Century Nightlife’, to the unusually commercial (and not entirely welcome) tones of ‘Mysterious Lover’, and the echoey, cinematic ‘Return To Love2′.

But getting lost in the music is half the reward. It’s immersive, and MacKenzie, our guide, inhabits these songs as though dramatising the chapters of his life.

It truly is a tragedy that musically, this chapter may well be the last one. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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