Jangle Town: Nikki Sudden & the Jacobites

Nikki Sudden's first 4 post-Swell Maps albums have been reissued by Numero. You'll love them if you ever imagined what a skid row Dylan playing with a post-punk Ronnie Wood might sound like: deathly romantic, intensely dramatic and tangled up in blues.

I'm no Nikki Sudden expert - the popular vote goes with Robespierre's Velvet Basement if you want a starting point, though I'd leap in and get all 4 albums. Because all these albums have at least one song that's almost as good as Jangle Town from his sixth album, Texas, and that's reason enough to buy all of them.

'Almost' because Jangle Town is one of pop music's high points. And maybe because you've got to have songs against which others must be measured. And that measurement is a song standing tall for 28 years and never leaving you.

Let's say it one more time for the broken-hearted: "I never said that I'd break your heart, but it was easy to do."



Here's the press release for this single from 1986. "He wishes to either remain or become a 'misunderstood songwriter and genius'." I guess he got his wish. Nikki Sudden died in 2006.