Looking through Rosalie Cunningham’s career, you can tell how far she’s come. From Ipso Facto to Purson to a solo artist, she’s got a lot of magic underneath her sleeve when it comes to performing, writing, and being a multi-instrumentalist. She’s been doing this for nearly 18 years, and has never backed down without a fight.
Between her first two studio albums, she has captured the source materials very well. Rosalie herself has kept everything inside her top hat, making sure that the music itself will erupt at any second with a powder keg, that’s waiting to explode at any second.
That and her follow-up to Two Piece Puzzle entitle To Shoot Another Day, details themes about the film industry. There are the tragic details, the success, the fame, the humour, and the price you pay at the very end. And to be allowed to have Rosco Wilson to co-write five songs, she knows that he has her back, no matter the cost.
Not to mention fellow guests in the wings which include Purson alumni Raphael Mura on drums, keyboardist David Woodcock, Gong’s Ian East on flute, clarinet, and sax, Itamar Rubinger on drums, and Fairport’s Ric Sanders on electric violin, they’re not just musicians, but more like a family to bring To Shoot Another Day to life.
The opening title-track begins with a fanfare Cunningham does to set up the scenery behind the scenes of her movie coming to life. She’s visioning the minds of Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey), Federico Fellini (8 1/2, Amarcord, La Dolce Vita), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Casino), Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), and Gerald Potterton (Heavy Metal), creating this adult-animated cult classic to life in its true form.
And we ain’t talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that Star Wars crap, we’re talking about a movie that’s brutal, honest, and right in your face that’ll give movie goers to see the film, more than once. Hopefully for midnight showings to become a perfect sensation. We cut to the humoristic Bowie-like attack from the Ziggy Stardust-era of ‘Timothy Martin’s Conditioning School’.
When you hear a title like that, it has a very Python-sque approach. But Rosalie gets down to business with heavy riffs, double-tracking vocals, and Jeff Lynne-like shining guitar lines from his Idle Race years. It’s the perfect icing on her delicious, red velvet cake, that’s waiting to be served after dinner.
Ian’s flute sets up the Flying Teapot for Rosalie to set foot on, honoring the late, great Daevid Allen. She’s channeling not just The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, but Gong’s golden years in the 1970s for ‘Heavy Pencil’. The first three minutes sees Rosalie going into a funkadelic groove before she sets the ignition to make the teapot make the jump to light-speed with psychedelic imagery coming to life.
She then goes straight into the styles of ‘You Can’t Kill Me’ from Camembert Electrique with its proto-punk attitude that Allen envisioned. Those cups of tea do come in handy while heading down into the Vaudevillian territory.
Between ‘Good to be Damned’ and ‘In the Shade of the Shadows’, she visions herself as Fred Astaire’s Top Hat to Alice Cooper’s Welcome to my Nightmare-era to make sure everything goes according to plan. Hearing the fourth track with its mellotronic, heavy guitar fanfare, it has nods to the Top Gun soundtrack, channeling Berlin’s ‘Take my Breath Away’.
It was unexpected at first, but Rosalie being Rosalie, she delivers the good to do the dances that were done from the 1920s to the 1930s. The fifth composition, we head into a smoky, jazzy night club in Paris, set in black-and-white from the 1950s. You can imagine Rosalie, wearing this luxurious, dark red dress, hair resembling the styles of Veronica Lake from Sullivan’s Travels, and singing this tune, she goes into a whole other level with this song.
The short instrumental track ‘The Smut Peddler’ and the lifting wonders of those ‘Denim Eyes’ take a very dark, but deeper approach. On the short composition, you can imagine Rosalie and Rosco are walking into Steven Wilson’s territory, honoring not just the Insurgentes-era, but continuing where ‘No Twilight Within the Courts of the Sun’ have left off.
It’s ‘Denim Eyes’ however, that gives a peak on how the House of the Glass Red has now suddenly become a loony bin, and Rosalie’s answer to Arkham Asylum as she rules the place with an iron fist. There are elements of the 10cc approach from The Original Soundtrack with its mellotron lullaby, uplifting organ chorus, and hypnotic eyes that you couldn’t shut off from.
‘Spook Racket’ is a preparation for Rosalie’s big premiere as she and Rosco bring in this mighty tank with huge megaphones, inviting people to come to the film that’s starting at midnight. They know how to pull it off when it comes to giving Hollywood, the big, giant middle finger.
It then heads into a very doomy ‘70s-like approach with its finger-picking Herbie Flowers-like bass line, nods to a darker version of T. Rex’s ‘Buick McKane’ from The Slider, acoustic-folk waltz, Italian prog with a delicious aroma, and Rosalie becoming the Empress on her throne, knowing that the clock is ticking through the Van der Graaf mind of H to He Who Am the Only One.
‘Stepped Out of Time’ sees Rosalie returning to her Veronica Lake characterisation, detailing the temperature levels for the big showing. But at what cost? It reaches towards how far she’s made it to the top in the New Hollywood during its heyday where the filmmakers broke the barrier and changed the way we look at movies.
Mellotron fanfare becomes a preparation for ‘The Premiere’. Here, we see movie goers entering the theatre with its acoustic pounce, militant drums, and the darker side of Hollywood that she described. As the movie starts, you can tell that the movie goers are hypnotised for what they’re seeing.
You can imagine Rosalie leaving the theatre, knowing that her mission is accomplished. She drives down to her home with its blistering midsection of riffs that speak of Sabbath and The Mars Volta rolled into one. The climax becomes a ticking time-bomb where she unveils her true powers in this intense drum section Mura does before landing back to Earth to reveal that her movie was a big success for midnight showings.
Two of the bonus tracks which were released seven months ago containing the conclusion of the Donovan Ellington story from the Two Piece Puzzle album entitle ‘Return of the Ellington’ is a sing-along sea shanty arpeggiated rocker with a call-and-response reputation thanks to Ric Sanders’ violin work.
Not only there’s the Fairport sound, but continuing more of the Italian prog techniques which speak of Premiata Forneria Marconi’s Storia Di Un Minuto, Gentle Giant’s ‘Wreck’, and bringing it all home by sending Donovan to be with his family. ‘Home’ is Rosalie’s break away from going from a psych star, to being a country artist for a brief moment.
You can imagine her listening to a lot of early Country music for inspiration, followed by Randy Newman’s lyrical textures to get an insight on where she wants to have that down home vibe in the American Frontier, singing in front of the cowboys, and they’re enjoying her company and let them sleep off into the night.
To Shoot Another Day has proven to be another crowning achievement for Rosalie Cunningham. There’s a lot of surprises in store to see what she’s been doing behind closed doors. And we got to experience it, top to bottom.
