Heartfelt tribute to the best of Badfinger's Peter Ham shines on 2-CD set
Various Artists
Shine On - A Tribute to Peter Ham
Y&T (2-CD Set)
Allegedly penniless at the time of his death, aged 27 in April 1975, Peter Ham was among the most brilliant songwriters of his era — that is, the lifetime of his band Badfinger. “No Matter What,” “Day After Day,” “Without You” (of course), “Just A Chance” and “Baby Blue,” so recently heard soundtracking the climax of Breaking Bad, all sprang from his pen, and the Welsh news website Nation Cymru website was not exaggerating when it said, on the eve of his 75th birthday last year, “[He] should by rights be a multi-millionaire.”
He should. Instead, he’s cult hero, a name known primarily to the faithful, and those folk who’ve memorized the writers of all the greatest songs in history… because “Without You,” at least, belongs there, alongside “These Foolish Things,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “Over The Rainbow,” and all those others that have so transcended their origins that their writers, too, remain unknown to the majority of listeners.
Shine On, a 2-CD tribute to Ham’s songwriting, is unlikely to alter that scenario — in fairness, there’s not much that could. But for anyone who looks at the above list of great Ham compositions and wonders, “what else?”, this is the primer that should certainly bump him up in terms of name recognition. And there’s probably a dozen more songs here that could edge any of the “famous” ones in turns of greatness.
The names enlisted to perform are not necessarily regarded as modern headliners, but that adds to the collection’s luster. Melanie takes on “Without You,” and she truly makes it her own, her voice dark, her pace slow, the accompaniment entrancing. Mary Lou Lord’s “Baby Blue” is blistering, beautiful; Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby take “Midnight Caller” into dark lo-fi territory, but it works so well for the song that it’s hard to imagine it in any other form.
The Speaker Wars do make a bit of a mess of what is described as the “World Version” of “No Matter What,” but more than make amends with a “Pop Version” — the moment where the band comes in, a couple of lines into an otherwise spartan intro, is breathtaking.
The ever-marvelous Parlophonics, too, cannot help but impress, “Song For a Lost Friend’ coming across like the better-looking love child of Big Star and the Boo Radleys; and Fernando Perdomo’s impossibly brief “Savile Row” feels like the closing theme to a swinging '60s movie. The Smokin’ Novas’ “Shine On” is simply luminous, in every sense of the word; Shelby Lynne’s “Day After Day” is as elegiac as Diane Ward’s “Lay Me Down” is a demented country rocker.
Everywhere, then, new gems come soaring out of the songbook, be it Life Boat’s dislocating “Crimson Ship” or The Chefs’ near punkoid “I Can’t Take It.” And the fact that every song can take whatever is thrown at it just reminds us, again, what a talent we are dealing with here, and what a loss we suffered when he left.
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