SIMON WARNER: Waiting Rooms

Active in music for nearly a quarter of a century but only venturing into the public gaze with acute rarity, 1997's Waiting Rooms is as yet the only Simon Warner album; a pained, and at times very funny, account of overaged bedsit life set to Richard Benbow's prosperous orchestrations which had the misfortune of coming out just as the Divine Comedy were at their critical and commercial peak; there wasn't room for two lush avant-balladeers, although there seemed to be room aplenty for scores of mirthless post-Oasis Britrockers.

But the album seems to be both prelude and epilogue to "Waiting Rooms," the song; it opens with Warner busking it, at one end or the other of the Victoria-Brighton line, humming into his wary acoustic guitar, and ends with a distant string chorale and an even more distant howl as he returns home, brews up a cup, lights up and switches the answerphone on for the evening. One Daphne Warner, who I presume is his mother, contributes mezzo-soprano backing, while Benbow's strings climb ominously and descend reluctantly behind Warner's recounting of the "scuffed snaps" of his mother he has just found; cinders of Chanel girl flashbacks, admission of a full and purposeful life having been lived...but now, a curious emptiness as she, or he, wanders alone through these increasingly dusty and empty passageways, life having spent most of its own bounty - "She's not at home! This home is haunted!" Warner growls with ineffable sadness (but not pity) as the orchestra repeatedly opens up and folds upon his smoky musings. "Waiting for...nothing but...time," he hisses like a prematurely aged David Essex, ushering in a music box: "Vulgar and dusted, an antique zone," which in turn leads to the strings and horns sweeping in again like not yet purulent vultures. But wherever he, or she, wanders, the loss, the absence, is inescapable; "but each new home feels like a train station waiting room." The swallowing feeling that he, and perhaps we, should be elsewhere instead of trespassing on our own wilfully suppressed ghosts. We need to know what happened in the intervening decade. Did he get out, and annul that faint Newley aroma of declining dissonance?