Reviews
'One of my all-time heroes - he's such a talented bloke, I could kill him' Mike Harding
'Like a couple dancing the tango' 4* Julian May, Songlines
'Very fine' Lester Simpson
'Fantastic!' The Durbervilles, BBC Radio Leeds
'Catch these guys live ... exhilarating' Taplas
'a bunch of top-drawer world musicians ... I can't wait 'til he takes it on the road' 4* John Medd, Nottingham Eve Post
'a winning aura' Clive Davis, The Sunday Times
'tunes that range from the stirring to the unashamedly sentimental' John L Walters The Guardian
'a definite success' fROOTS
'What a great CD! I was hooked from the first track' Genevieve Tudor, Sunday Folk BBC MIdlands
'Superb' Frank Hennessy, Celtic Heartbeat BBC Radio Wales
'It's a lovely record, really lovely!' Stuart Maconie
Friday July 13, 2007 The Guardian
Ian McMillan chooses his friends well. Ideas Have Legs, his recent collaboration with designers Fuel and illustrator Andy Martin, is an inspired and original volume that brings new meaning to his poems. Sharp Stories does something similar with sound, pitting McMillan's "speak-songs" against world music compositions by Szapora multi-instrumentalist Luke Carver Goss.
The orchestra's five musicians blast away on acoustic instruments - fiddles, accordions, whistles, hurdy-gurdy - while the leader holds forth on such diverse subjects as a Russian heatwave, his dad, a quarryman's hardhat and a list of nicknames that is also an elegy for Yorkshire industry. The words would sound good in any voice. But the crispness and clarity of McMillan's Barnsley accent give Goss a rhythmic springboard for tunes that range from the stirring to the unashamedly sentimental, as in the Ronnie Barker tribute, It's Goodnight From Him, a fond memoir of family telly-watching.
John L Walters