THERE'S THE RUB

For starters, I agree with others that state this is one of the best produced albums ever.

The prog nature of There's The Rub comes with the brilliant, experimental twin lead guitar manoeuvrings...... yes manoeuvrings! There's The Rub is a journey of sorts, the interplay between"new boy" Laurie Wisefeild and "the older statesman" Andy Powell (who was only 24 at the time!) was to this listener ...spine tingling. The previous album Wishbone Four sounded like a relic of a bygone era compared to this futuristic output. The harmony was better, the songs/music were life changing and I was on cloud ten.

The weakest song on the album is "Hometown"....an Allman Brothers copy if you've ever heard one but even then it is a good track. All the others are 5 star raters. Silver Shoes, Don't Come Back, Persephone, Lady Jay and F*U*B*B*......a mixture of hard edge stuff with melodic, more tempered classics.

The thing that sets apart WA is that their music always had a sophisticated, melodic, experimental side to it. And I put that in the prog category. There were some latter offerings from Wishbone that were awful (Twin Barrels Burning and Raw To The Bone) but There's The Rub is an album that is unique for it's innovation both in production and playing.

The album cover is brilliant. Many individuals from countries other than Britain, Australia, etc think its rude i.e. something to do with masturbation or something ridiculous like that. But it is not. Wishbone Ash wanted people to know that they were English, even though they sort of had an American sound on this record. This was their first album recorded in America and they would be tax exiles in the US for a number of years after this. So the close up is of a cricketer rubbing a cricket ball near his crotch. This is a practice performed by all bowlers (pitchers for a baseball analogy), where they rub one side to make it shiny and roughen the other side so that when the ball is bowled (pitched) it will swing in the air to deceive the batsman (batter). So There's the Rub!

Five big ones.

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