Ernesto de Pascale - Morning Manic Music

Time to go home, it just takes a long time to get there

Anyone who read Ernesto de Pascale’s DFG piece on the Musicians’ Union London District Directory 1976 (RC 345) will be forgiven for thinking that he’s recently holed himself up in a studio and used it to invite his favourite musicians round for a jam. Prior to a fully collaborative release with Ashley Hutchings due this year, de Pascale has called in Steeleye Span’s Ken Nicol to lay down acoustic and electric guitars on an album that could quite easily also have been subtitled “Life As A World-Weary Traveller”.

Populated with all manner of lost characters, a lost Hollywood and a protagonist that’s “playing the game that no one else is playing”, Morning Manic Music is more a soundtrack to a manic lifestyle, let alone morning. Camden Town, Blackpool, Hollywood and New York City (“just for one day”) all fly past the window, making de Pascale’s Italian homeland noticeable by its absence in an album essentially tracing one man’s displacement. It seems to say that, while you might be successful (and de Pascale is essentially the Italian John Peel), you still need to find your way home. You can’t help but sympathise, and we all wish him a safe journey back.

ll Popolo Del Blues | PDB 2007 015-2

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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