Louis Philippe

Louis Philippe

Louis Philippe may still be best known as a purveyor of creamy pop confections for Mike Alway's wonderfully eccentric él label, yet his work continued to deepen and develop long after él bit the dust in 1989.

He once described his music as "covering the range from pure bubblegum to symphonic sweep, with detours via jazz and soul along the way. A typical album might mix influences from vintage pop, French chanson, Ravel, bossa nova, Duke Ellington, the Shirelles, or the Beach Boys, while classical instruments and intricate backing vocals often feature in the arrangements." Yet although his records should, by rights, appeal to anyone who appreciates the virtues of an elegantly crafted melody swathed in dense harmonies, Philippe's heartfelt and sophisticated records have always struggled to find an audience beyond a loyal — and far-flung — coterie of fans. Undaunted, however, he has continued to make records on his own terms, though at an ever greater remove from the mainstream recording industry.

Born Philippe Auclair in Normandy in 1959, he studied and taught philosophy in Paris before releasing his first EP as the Border Boys in 1985. Not long after, he left France, and his subsequent band, the Arcadians, to pursue his dream of being a songwriter in the land that spawned his beloved Kinks. Like many French pop composers, he believed English to be the lingua franca of rock & roll and, thanks to an excellent English teacher and intensive study of Ray Davies' work, was soon writing lyrics that betrayed nary a trace of their author's origins.

It was Mike Alway who persuaded Auclair to change his name, in accordance with the él philosophy that every one of its artists should adopt an exotic character based upon their own personality and background. The name Louis Philippe was chosen because the Auclair family's coat of arms turned out to be similar to that of King Louis Philippe d'Orléans, and because as the "king of the bourgeoisie" with nothing much to commend him, Alway and Auclair felt the name was bound to provoke a reaction among those humorless agents of the British indie rock world who hoped to bring down the Thatcher government with grim diatribes and grinding guitars.

Over two years Philippe recorded three remarkably accomplished albums for él — Appointment with Venus, Ivory Tower, and Yuri Gagarin — as well as working as the label's in-house arranger/composer/session musician (including the Anthony Adverse album The Red Shoes — which he composed and arranged from top to bottom). But many who discovered Philippe during this period were left baffled as he then seemed to vanish from the map. In fact, he was recording two albums — the more playfully experimental Jean Renoir and Rainfall — that initially secured a release only in Japan, where Philippe had been astonished to find himself being hailed as a godfather of the so-called Tokyo "Shibuya sound" that spawned the likes of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five.

Philippe's next two albums — Delta Kiss and Sunshine — secured a release through the short-lived Humbug label, and it was around this time that he looked like he would be scoring a hit in his native France with the single "L'Hiver Te Va Bien." But its success in becoming a Top 30 airplay hit failed to translate into actual record sales because, crucially, his French distributor had neglected to ensure that copies of the single were available in stores.

Yet by now Philippe was finding himself in ever greater demand as an arranger, working with acts as diverse as P.J. Proby and Saint Etienne. A further important source of income was his work as a freelance sports reporter for organizations as diverse as the BBC World Service and France Sport.

When Humbug disappeared in a puff of accountancy, however, it took the Bertrand Burgalat-produced Sunshine — one of Philippe's most delightful and enduringly popular albums — with it. Once more Philippe was left stranded, until the él-inspired Spanish label Siesta stepped in to release his next album, Jackie Girl. This was followed by his most ambitious recording to date. Azure, released in 1998, featured elaborate settings for a full symphony orchestra, yet while the likes of the Divine Comedy basked in critics' praise for attempting something similar, if arguably less successfully, Azure passed unnoticed.

Further disappointment followed when Philippe played to a sell-out audience at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York to promote his first U.S. release — the compilation A Kiss in the Funhouse — and within weeks one of its songs was number one in the CMJ charts. But yet again his distributors failed him, and copies of the record were nowhere to be found.

After Azure, Philippe took the extraordinary step of recording an album of songs by the French composer Francis Poulenc, accompanied only by his long-term collaborator Danny Manners. Nusch was followed in 2002 by My Favourite Part of You, a return to more conventional recording methods for what turned out to be Philippe's most personal album to date. This also marked his first collaboration with the critically acclaimed British novelist Jonathan Coe, who provided lyrics for three songs, and with whom he also worked on the fusion of spoken word and music that was 9th & 13th.

Subsequently recovering from a debilitating illness, Philippe decided he no longer wanted to waste his energies on negotiating with record companies, so his next recording — 2004's The Wonder of It All — was funded entirely by fans via the Internet, and released on his own Wonder Records imprint. Again, the few reviews it did secure were unfailingly positive, yet the bulk of the British music press gave it the by now familiar cold shoulder. He continues to be in demand as an arranger, however, with younger bands like the Clientele bringing him on board for their highly successful Strange Geometry album.

There is no doubt that Philippe's reluctance to tour — though he is an accomplished live performer — or make videos has limited his chances of making any great impact on a mass audience. And perhaps his early years as a quasi-fictional character on a label that many critics had written off as a hotbed of mischief-making fops and dandies militated against his mature work being afforded the respect it deserved. Yet when it comes to writing the kind of beautiful, flowing melodies that are commonly regarded as belonging to a golden age of popular music, Philippe has few contemporary peers.

In 2006, as Philippe Auclair, he also became a published author in France with Le Royaume Enchanté de Tony Blair.

Appointment With Venus (1986)

There were many prevailing fashions on the British music scene in the mid-'80s, but Louis Philippe's first solo album flew breezily in the face of them all. It's safe to say that only a label as playfully perverse as Mike Alway's el would have got it made in the first place, yet even within its '60s-led pop fantasy ethos, Appointment with Venus sits awkwardly. Certainly, it buys into el's propensity for sun-dappled bossa nova and dreamy harmonies, although such is the preponderance of acoustic guitars and almost total absence of drums that it risked being taken for a folk album. It's no such thing, of course, yet though it straddles genres in a way that would become increasingly familiar as Philippe's career progressed, it does so with much less assurance than later works. What's more, there are songs here that wouldn't have got past quality control on subsequent albums, notably the cack-handed "When I'm an Astronaut," whose aesthetic crimes include rhyming "magnets" with "planets." Most striking of all for anyone familiar with his mature work is that Philippe's subsequent mastery of the arranger's art is here barely half-formed. Only a few songs run to actual strings, rather than the wheezy old synth decreed by budgetary constraints, and even those sound thin and unconvincing. Yet for all its flaws, Appointment contains many pointers to the way Philippe's music would deepen and broaden, including his first full-fledged masterpiece, "Fires Rise and Die." This is one of those rare songs — Brian Wilson's "Surf's Up" is another — whose exquisite, endlessly unfurling melody seems to have emerged fully formed without reference to anything that has gone before. There's also a tantalizingly brief passage of haunting a cappella harmony — this time Wilson's "Our Prayer" springs to mind — bookending the tracks "I Will" and "Eldorado Tales" (another highlight), which provides further confirmation that, even at the outset of his career, Philippe was able to access the kind of ravishing beauty to which most singer/songwriters can't even aspire. Newcomers to his work, however, are advised to start elsewhere.

Ivory Tower (1988)

In the two years since his debut album, Appointment with Venus, Louis Philippe had embarked on a particularly steep learning curve as the él label's all-purpose arranger, composer, and accompanist. The dividend was clear, for Ivory Tower represents a tremendous leap forward in terms of both composition and orchestration from its relatively timid predecessor. For the first time Philippe was able to flex the broad stylistic reach that would characterize his output for years to come. Not that you would have deduced this from the sleeve, which proclaimed "The Romantic Voice of Louis Philippe" and thus probably alienated many potential buyers who took him for an MOR crooner. Inside, of course, there's no lack of the fantasy pop that characterized both his early singles and él's output in general on songs like "Smash Hit Wonder," "Mindreader," and "Chocolate Soldiers," while "Guess I'm Dumb" is a remarkably assured re-creation of a long-lost Brian Wilson gem, written for Glen Campbell. Other songs push the pop envelope in all kinds of unexpected directions. Echoes of chanson, '30s jazz, classical song, choral music, and bossa nova keep the listener constantly on his toes, notwithstanding the slender resources at Philippe's disposal. The instrumental title track, meanwhile, sounds like an undiscovered toy-town symphony from the Beach Boys' SMiLE. On the tantalizingly brief "House of a Thousand Windows" (only included on the CD reissue) there are even hints of the experimentation with layered voices that would recur on Rainfall and Jean Renoir. Overall, such ravishing attention to detail flew directly in the face of the then prevailing fashion for shoegazing, with its featureless smears of flanged guitar noise. As a consequence, though "Guess I'm Dumb" was made Single of the Week by both NME and Melody Maker, Ivory Tower established what was to become a depressingly familiar pattern by slipping all too quickly from view.

Yuri Gagarin (1989)

Louis Philippe has often described the making of his final album for Mike Alway's gloriously eccentric él label as a less-than-happy experience. Though he and fellow arranger/producer Dean Brodrick had been afforded the relatively princely budget of 10,000 pounds, which they promptly invested in a 24-track studio and a bevy of session musicians, the combination of friction between the two of them and a tendency to get carried away with the instrumental resources at their disposal for the first time took a heavy toll. Yet a listener alighting on Yuri Gagarin for the first time is unlikely to discern much in the way of bad vibes. Even more so than its predecessor, Ivory Tower, it simply teems with ideas. From his earliest recordings, it had been clear that Philippe was able to conjure sophisticated pop melodies seemingly at will. By now though, his hard work as él's in-house arranger was also beginning to pay further dividends, and as a consequence, many of the songs here venture some distance from the sunshine pop models (Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, et al.) that had served him so well in the past. At its delirious peak on a song like "Jean and Me," this playful fusion of vaulting melody and constantly surprising arrangements for brass and woodwind takes your breath away. Elsewhere, however, it's the very cause of the album's downfall. Too often Philippe's vocals are left to fight it out in the mix with overwrought orchestrations that, moreover, often sound ragged and ill-focused. The album is also cursed throughout by a drum sound that suggests a packing case being belabored with a dead fish. Nevertheless, Yuri Gagarin contains some of its creator's strongest songs in "Diamond," "Anna S'en Va," and "Goodbye Again." If it is ultimately a victim of Philippe and Brodrick's overweening ambition, let us not forget that in 1989, with the pop world in the grip of techno and shoegazing, overweening ambition was in desperately short supply.

Rainfall (1991)

Following the demise of él Records in 1989, Louis Philippe found his career unexpectedly blighted by the widespread belief that the whole él roster consisted entirely of fictional characters dreamed up by the label's Svengali figure, Mike Alway. Yet when he did get back to work, rather than present the mainstream recording industry with a calling card in the form of a commercially viable album, Philippe — and his collaborator Dean Brodrick — came up with two of his most experimental collections to date. The first, Rainfall, was driven by a self-imposed (and conveniently low-budget) manifesto which dictated that every sound on the album should be the product of either voice or piano, both of which are heavily multi-tracked. Though they bent the rules by using a sampler too, Philippe and Brodrick also used considerable ingenuity in obtaining a range of sounds from the piano by, in that dread term employed by avant-garde jazz musicians, going "under the lid." Although the instrument was variously plucked, beaten, and ravished, the results were far from cacophonous. In fact much of the album's experimentalism stems more from song selection and structure than a desire to push the envelope sonically. An unusually large number of cover versions included Britten's "The Sally Gardens," the traditional English folk song "The Captain's Apprentice," a vocal interpretation of Duke Ellington's "Chelsea Bridge" (in French), and Brian Wilson's "I Guess I Just Wasn't Made for These Times." As for the original material here, Philippe's range of models and influences is more far-flung than ever. "The Dark" seems to originate from a musical co-written by Leonard Bernstein and Brian Eno, while songs like "The Metempsychosis Song" and "The Corncircle Dance" reach a degree of knotty intricacy that veers between thrilling and daunting. There are admittedly moments when Rainfall's deliberately restricted palette seems perverse in the face of so much harmonic and rhythmic adventure, yet it's hard to imagine how the version of the album's strongest track, "Still Life" could have been bettered at any cost. Just 5,000 copies of Rainfall were pressed and sold in Japan, where Philippe had found a new audience as one of the progenitors of the Shibuya-kei sound. It was only finally released in Europe as part of a two-CD set with its successor, Jean Renoir, in the late '90s.

Jean Renoir (1992)

For their second collaboration, Louis Philippe and Dean Brodrick relaxed the self-imposed "only vocals and piano" rule that governed the first, Rainfall, to the extent of admitting drums and guitars. Nevertheless, it's the lush vistas of multi-tracked voices that dominate an album that's frequently cinematic in terms of both scope and subject matter. Along with the album's title track, there's a song called "An American Friend" (actually inspired by John Ford's The Searchers), a version of the Ogden Nash/Kurt Weill song "Speak Low" (here rendered as "Tous Bas") from the musical One Touch of Venus, and "Vicky Page," a love song for the ballet-dancing heroine of The Red Shoes. The infectious "Nowhere Square," too, sounds as though it were written for a screwball musical comedy. Any listeners who got as far as sampling the album in a shop, however, might never have reached these delights, deterred as they may have been by the bizarre guttural chants of "Une Ile," a frankly disastrous choice for the opening track. Yet fears that the pair's avowed experimentalism might have led into murky waters are immediately dispelled by "Lazy English Sun," a slice of effortless sunshine pop that resurfaced, appropriately enough, on the Sunshine album. It's nevertheless Jean Renoir's darker songs that give the album its unique character, notably the three that feature telling vocal contributions from Microdisney's Cathal Coughlan — "Hunters," "True Men," and "An American Friend." The latter in particular, an unsettling six-minute epic built around a swirling miasma of sampled voices, is one of Philippe's most remarkable creations, and light years removed from the candy pop for which he is still best known. The wistful "Vicky Page" — with its spectral setting of synths and drum machine — is another triumph of imagination over budget. For all the album's many pleasures, however, there remains a suspicion that, overall, Jean Renoir lacks the final degree of melodic finesse that characterizes Philippe's very best work. Perhaps its principal value, along with Rainfall, lies in the freedom both projects afforded Philippe to develop his skills as both composer and arranger in ways that would inform his later, less exploratory work.

Delta Kiss (1994)

After the sonic experiments of Jean Renoir and Rainfall, Delta Kiss represented something of a return to the terra firma of tightly constructed pop songs. Which is not to denounce it as a retrograde step in any way. Rather there's a newfound crispness and economy to the arrangements — for the first time in the hands of long-term collaborator Danny Manners — that perfectly complement some of Louis Philippe's most felicitous songs to date. Opener "Like Any Other," which began life on Ivory Tower as a sketchy instrumental called "Perfume," blossoms here as one of its composer's most fully realized creations, its sinuous melody underscored by a beautiful, Asian-tinged setting for the Covent Garden String Quartet. Even further removed from the humdrum bustle of rock & roll is "Evenings Fall," a twilight meditation on mortality whose intricately serried chorales spiral heavenward. Yet the Louis Philippe who penned pop confections like "You Mary You" only seven years earlier is also well represented on Delta Kiss. Few songs in the pop canon, for instance, are guaranteed to brighten your day quite so breezily as the irresistible "A Paris," while "L'Aventure" is a deliciously corny Parisian waltz with a melody that sounds like it's weathered the centuries. A further departure is provided by a sprightly version of the Jim Pepper classic, based on a Sioux war chant, "Witch-Tai-To," while the album concludes — like Yuri Gagarin — with another soaring evocation of a child's dream of space travel in "Destination Moon." If some of the other songs don't quite measure up, it's only because Philippe was starting to hit the kind of stratospheric heights of invention that makes consistency impossible. Certainly there's enough timeless beauty on Delta Kiss to ensure that it outlasts most of the albums that outsold it a hundred times over.

Sunshine (1995)

There may be Louis Philippe albums that hit greater heights of invention, but Sunshine is arguably the purest distillation of his multi-faceted talent to date and an album to which those coming afresh to Philippe's work can be most safely referred. On first acquaintance it suggests a desire to revisit the sunshine pop of his youth — there are sensual bossa novas aplenty, evocations of languid, hazy days, wistful recollections of lost loves, sparkling rivers, warm rain, plucked guitars, and some of the sweetest pop melodies this side of the '60s. Songs like "Martine," "Only a Fool," and "Carioca," for instance, will almost certainly dispel rain clouds on contact. Yet this is no mere nostalgic indulgence in the days of Chris Montez (name-checked on the album's weakest track, "Our Boat Can Wait") and Friends-era Beach Boys. Sunshine has its darker side in the form of some of Philippe's most sumptuous ballads, notably the languorous "Ainsi Va Sa Vie," which also benefits from a haunting arrangement for strings and theremin. Even further removed from the album's prevailing mood is Philippe's solemn interpretation of the Francis Poulenc song "Montparnasse," foreshadowing a collection of the composer's songs that formed the 1997 album Nusch. Sunshine also came closest to providing Philippe with a hit in his native France, after the Japanese-flavored "L'Hiver Te Va Bien" began garnering heavy airplay, only to fail when it turned out that shops had not been supplied with copies of the single — the kind of rotten luck that has dogged Philippe's career. In fact, the whole album — which was produced by Bertrand Burgalat just a few years before he became a prime mover in the whole Gallic retro-modern dance movement — seemed jinxed after it was hit by the collapse of Humbug Records before it could be properly distributed. Only with its subsequent reissue by Cherry Red as a two-fer with Delta Kiss — containing three extra tracks — did Sunshine reach any kind of audience. By then, though, the moment had been lost, and an album that should have established Philippe as one of pop's finest composers instead left him further entrenched in obscurity.

Jackie Girl (1996)

Jackie Girl (named in tribute to '60s chanteuse Jackie DeShannon) may not quite have the pop smarts of Sunshine, or the heady orchestral textures of Azure, but it's nevertheless a fascinating stopping-off point between the two. Utilizing his broadest palette to date, including then-XTC guitarist David Gregory, Philippe succeeds in giving songs like "Every Day Gone By" and "She Means Everything to Me" a muscularity and an edge that were missing from Sunshine. The title track, too, has few precedents in Philippe's canon, with its plangent tremolo guitars and wah-wah brass. Yet as usual with Philippe, melody remains in charge throughout, from the joyous exoticism a-go-go of "Oiseau de Paradis" to the unabashedly cinematic "Mr Songbird." Two instrumentals, "La Pointe du Jour" and "The Girl in the Attic," also suggest that Phillipe is a soundtrack composer waiting to happen. Yet it's a leftover from the Sunshine sessions that provides Jackie Girl with its most stunning six minutes. "Deauville" is a starkly dramatic ballad, with a brooding, Bernard Herrmann-esque string arrangement that would grace any Scott Walker album. In what was becoming an all-too-familiar story for Philippe's followers, Jackie Girl — released this time only on the Spanish label Siesta — was sketchily distributed and promoted in the U.S. and U.K. to the point where even his most loyal fans could have missed it entirely. It may not be his most consistent work, but its high points are very high indeed.

Azure (1998)

Given that one of Louis Philippe's strongest suits had always been the knack of making a shoestring budget sound like a million bucks, the lavish resources deployed on Azure — nothing less than a 60-piece symphony orchestra — came as something of a shock. Yet beyond the question of how such a feat could be economically viable lay the more important one of whether Philippe and his arranger, Danny Manners, had made it work. After all, there had been many previous attempts to fuse classical music and pop, from Rick Wakeman to the Divine Comedy. Almost invariably, the results were disappointing, with the orchestra supplying little more than pseudo-romantic bombast or a cosmetic, status-enhancing sheen, in both cases applied to songs after the event. Here, though, song and orchestration function as a single entity, and in fact it's genuinely hard to imagine songs like "Your Life," "You'll Never Catch the Sun," and "Partir" without their serenely beautiful settings for the Prague Philharmonic. Philippe's harmonic language frequently ventures into jazz and classical territory, so his songs are better equipped than most to hold their own in such exalted company. Furthermore, anyone who has previously dismissed him as a fey-voiced crooner of marshmallow pop tunes would do well to consider "Your Life," whose soaring climaxes allow him to display a previously unsuspected soulfulness. Manners, too, excels throughout, bringing an especially magical Debussian delicacy to the strings that dapple "You'll Never Catch the Sun." Elsewhere, the title track is a charming homage to Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson, and the hushed interpretation of Andy Partridge's "I Can't Own Her" arguably tops XTC's own version, released the same year though recorded later. Only the poignant George Best tribute "When Georgie Died" and the unashamedly lightweight "An Ordinary Girl" seem to have strayed in from another, more intimate album. For all its manifold beauties and risk-taking, Azure was disgracefully ignored by the music press on both sides of the Atlantic. When one day they come to write the story of pop's — mostly catastrophic — dalliances with classical music, perhaps then its true value will be recognized.

Nusch (1998)

Having dipped a toe into the songs of Francis Poulenc with an interpretation of "Montparnasse" on the Sunshine album, Louis Philippe opted for full immersion with this collection, a labor of love that was certain to leave all but his most loyal fans just a little perplexed. Abandoning the lush orchestrations of Azure, he is accompanied throughout only by the impeccable piano of Danny Manners, who also performs two solo pieces. The songs are drawn from across the range of Poulenc's output, from relatively familiar works like "La Grenouillere" to lesser-known pieces like "Bleuet" and "Tu Vois Le Feu du Soir." Yet although there's no questioning the reverence and commitment that Philippe and Manners bring to this project, whether it will strike the listener as a brave or reckless undertaking is less certain. For a pop singer, even attempting to negotiate such fearsomely complex material might be considered foolhardy, and it's a measure of Philippe's technique that he copes admirably, if not always effortlessly. Aficionados of Poulenc's work will, however, be used to hearing it interpreted by classically trained singers, and many will feel that Philippe's pure but reedy voice lacks the gravitas and control of a seasoned baritone. Anyone coming at this from the world of pop and rock, on the other hand, might find that his more intimate and informal approach offers a less daunting way into some undeniably beautiful and rarely heard music. The album ends with an unbilled version of "Deauville," one of Philippe's own — and most memorable — songs and one that is by no means disgraced by such elevated company.

My Favourite Part Of You (2002)

Over the years Louis Philippe has almost single-handedly upheld the moribund art of the sleeve note, reflecting on his music's provenance, sources of inspiration, and recording process with insight and humor. Significantly, he chose to forego this tradition for the first time on My Favourite Part of You, an indication that the songs it contained were some of the most personal of his career to date, and required no further elucidation. This lack of adornment carries over into the music itself, which by Philippe's standards borders on the austere. Lest anyone run away with the idea that the result is a harrowing descent into the tortured soul of the artist, however, it must be said straight away that by anyone else's standards MFPOY would be considered an oasis of melody and harmony. Indeed "A Face in the Crowd" sounds like a long-lost Bacharach classic, complete with sprightly flügelhorn solo, while "True Love" is one of several songs that boast a typically elegant arrangement for the Covent Garden String Ensemble — though the sweetly voiced syllables of "fuckall" suggest that darker emotions lie beneath the song's tranquil surface. A further highlight is provided by the somber "Before the Rain," one of three songs with lyrics by the English novelist Jonathan Coe — its piercing one-note trumpet solo a masterful demonstration of the old adage that less is more. Throughout, too, the listener cannot fail to be aware that Philippe's voice — fresh from the trial by fire of Nusch, his album of songs by Francis Poulenc — has acquired a sinewy strength. Most notably, on a song like "I Need It" he is able to express an intensity of longing far beyond his previous emotional range. All told, MFPOY may be its composer's most strictly conventional album, for the most part denuded of the luscious harmonies and dense orchestrations that are undeniably a major part of Philippe's appeal. But its (relative) simplicity and directness may appeal to many who usually find his work over-ornate and too clever by half.

9th and 13th (2003)

Collaborations between novelists and songwriters are rare, the only persuasive argument that they can bear fruit being the substantial body of work recorded by Pete Atkin with lyrics by Clive James. 9th & 13th has even fewer precedents in that the novelist Jonathan Coe's role here is solely to read out extracts from his hugely enjoyable best-selling novel The Rotters' Club, with or without accompaniment by Louis Philippe and pianist Danny Manners. The novel has a musical theme (as does the title, which refers to a seductively ambiguous chord), though most of the extracts read — and occasionally acted — out here concern its adolescent protagonist Benjamin's longing for the unattainable sixth-form siren Cicely. Coe, himself something of a thwarted musician, has spoken of how he aspires to find a new way of integrating music and the spoken word. Yet though such a fusion is not uncommon in the theater, it's hard to think of a single example of a rock album on which music and recitatif happily co-exist. While the principal reason for this may be the wretched standard of most rock poetry or storytelling (think Moody Blues, think Pete Townshend), there's also no getting away from the fact that spoken passages pall quickly with repetition. Added to this, Coe is a much better writer than he is a reader of his own work. There simply isn't the range of expression in his voice to add anything that isn't already on the page. As for Philippe's contributions, these largely consist of some breezy instrumental interludes, a short new song called "Somniloquy," and re-recordings of "Destination Moon" (from Delta Kiss) and "Fires Rise and Die" (from Appointment with Venus). The latter, one of Philippe's most remarkable songs, is a substantial improvement on the original and, in truth, represents the one cogent reason to seek out 9th & 13th. Perhaps as an admission of defeat, in recent years Coe has begun to write lyrics for Philippe — with infinitely more satisfying results.

The Wonder Of It All (2004)

Twenty years into a career littered with elegantly wrought, enormously sophisticated records sabotaged by any number of business-related setbacks, and also recovering from a period of debilitating illness, Louis Philippe could have been forgiven for chucking in the towel and scampering back to his day job as a freelance sports writer. Instead, he set about raising funds through his widely scattered fanbase and produced The Wonder of It All entirely independently. Once more reduced to smaller instrumental forces, without even his beloved Covent Garden String Quartet to add their customary filigree, Philippe's wizardry as an arranger has never been more deftly deployed. Only five musicians worked on this record — including the High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan on Spanish guitar and banjo — yet rarely is the listener conscious of a restricted tonal palette. In fact even with an army of musicians to draw upon, it's doubtful whether Philippe could have achieved anything more magical than the blending of melodica and flutes on "If That Is Youth," or the vibes and piano that drive "A Wiser Fool." This is a beautifully recorded album, too, with Philippe's ever more resonant voice especially afforded the kind of space and presence that was often missing in his earliest recordings. As usual, however, it's the quality of Philippe's melodies that most beguiles. A far cry from the stunted outgrowths that pass muster for most contemporary songwriters, Philippe's songs unfurl gracefully, never opting for the familiar resolution when more enticing possibilities beckon. He is aided as ever by the richly expressive accompaniment of Danny Manners on piano and bass, and it's worth mentioning too that the title track — a poignant tale of old flames reflecting on roads not taken — marks a further collaboration between Philippe and the leading British novelist Jonathan Coe. For all Philippe's good feelings about the album, though, it was as comprehensively ignored by the critics as its predecessors.