A seamless blend of old and new.  Liverpool-based producer Fran Ashcroft revisits his tape archives and creates new life.

Release Date:  23^rd February 2024

Label: Self Release

Formats: CD, Digital

Never throw anything away is a piece of advice that often gets ignored, but Liverpool-based producer, musician and creator Fran Ashcroft has demonstrated, with his new album – The Songs That Never Were – the absolute sagacity of that phrase.  The Songs That Never Were sees Fran delving into his tape archives – fifty years’ worth of them – and using the base recordings as a foundation for something new and absolutely unique.

The way it works is something like this: AI technology was used to separate out the parts of Fran’s old recordings that he wanted to use for his new songs.  Usually, the original vocal tracks were deleted and new lyrics – and often new melodies – were added.  The updated tracks were then finished – not too obviously, mind – with added drums, piano, bass and percussion, and the result is a set of twelve tunes that effectively span the generations, from the 1970s to the present day.  I’ve quite literally never heard anything remotely like this before.

And, here’s the inspired bit: in plundering all these chunks of his sometimes distant past, Fran has been fastidious in using the selections from his old tapes in exactly the condition that they’ve been preserved.  There’s been no polishing, no remastering and no cleansing.  The Songs That Never Were – “…a collaboration between me and me,” as Fran describes it – is as proudly lo-fi as it’s possible to be.  Fran elaborates: “I expected these new recordings to be all about using AI technology, but that was just a convenient tool, like any other.  What the process actually turned out to be was a real collaboration between my present-day self and me from 50 years ago – like some kind of bridge of time had been built between us.  It sounds weird, I know (feel free to giggle) where each song, whether an old recording or a new idea, was developed and transformed into something completely different from what it was to begin with.  It was just as if I was working with a co-writer, and quite strange at times.”

If you’ve read this far, you’ll understand that The Songs That Never Were is a very personal joint project between Fran 2024 and Fran 1970s, but the album isn’t entirely all his own work.  In order to fully realise the ideas he applied to his old recordings, he’s enlisted the services of a few close friends; Dave Mohan has added new drum parts where necessary, David Booth has provided a bit of piano, Gez Prior has chipped in with a touch of bass and John Drazek has added splashes of percussion.  The new additions blend seamlessly with the old and impact is strangely organic.

But what does it sound like, I hear you ask?

Well – Fran’s process has achieved something entirely unique.  The new additions are as lo-fi as the original tapes, Fran’s vocals are intimate and clear, and the tunes have echoes of a wide range of influences, mainly from the 60s and early 70s.  My ears picked up strains of The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, T.Rex, Donovan and Syd Barrett; yours may very well detect other sounds.  The Songs That Never Were is THAT kind of album.

It’s the album’s lead single, Waiting for the Britpop Revival, that gets The Songs That Never Were underway.  It’s the track that Fran first recorded to check if his process was viable, and he was clearly satisfied on that score.  The sparse backing – barely anything other than a piano – allows plenty of space for Fran’s lyrics and, with lines like: “Waiting for the Britpop revival – just another load of art school wankers,” “Blame it on old Damon Albarn – I’m still waiting for a credit on the album” and “Don’t talk to me about Oasis – that’s a shit band name if there ever was one,” there’s loads here to relish.

There’s a lot of late-sixties English psychedelia on The Songs That Never Were, and the introspective High Window is a great example, in which Fran’s lyrics reflect on isolation amid frenzied outside activity, in much the same way that Ray Davies observed the antics of Terry and Julie in Waterloo Sunset.  The blend between the original tape recording and the new additions is particularly noticeable in Suddenly and, perhaps even more so in Cabdriver, a development of Fran’s first-ever recording, in which Lou Reed and Marc Bolan seem to be fighting for airspace beneath Fran’s Lennonesque vocals.

Agonised guitar feedback provides the into to the aptly-named Strange Things, a burst of pastoral psychedelia which is, just maybe, my favourite track on the album.  Simply-strummed guitars provide the sublime backing, as lyrics like: “Alligator in the bathroom in the middle of the afternoon” form a list of “Strange things that happen.”  The song is a masterpiece in observational surrealism.  And the psychedelic strangeness doesn’t end there; The dreamlike Carnival intersperses intimate vocal instructions with sequences of nightmare carnival and fairground sounds – it’s all a bit like a particularly lysergic episode of Dr Who!

Lo-Fi chant, Greater of the Evils is followed by the crisp, bright and short I Believe In You, before Fran settles into Compass, the album’s longest track and another tune in which a 70s rhythm track echoes down the years to sit alongside contemporary guitar sounds and Fran’s Lennon-like (or, perhaps Innes-like is a more accurate description) vocals. 

High Wind Oh, an interesting cacophony of soloing guitars that speed up until they stop, provides another short interlude, before Fran takes the opportunity to express his fervent views on how commercialization is stifling creativity in today’s music industry, with the album’s title track.  He makes his point very firmly with lines like: “Whoever pays the piper will call the tune; if you want to play the game, it’s up to you” and the listener is left in no doubt: Fran Ashcroft will not be compromising his independent principles anytime soon – and we should all be mightily grateful for that.

There’s still time to squeeze in a short monologue before this intriguing album reaches its close and, to do so, Fran returns to the subject of Britpop for one final word.  He was apparently living in the USA when Britpop spent its short few days in the UK sun, so he’s more able than most to pass a rational judgement of the impact it had.  His conclusion?  Britpop didn’t create the permanent change that we all hoped, or even believed, it would.  It didn’t change Britain for the better; we’re worse off now than ever – we’re lucky that the lights are still on!  And he managed to squeeze that conclusion into just 31 seconds.

Listen to Waiting for the Britpop Revival – the album’s lead single – here:

Fran Ashcroft online: Facebook / YouTube / Bandcamp

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