Andy Bell – Pinball Wanderer review

Never an artist to let things drift, over the last decade Andy Bell has occupied himself with a number of collaborative projects as well as maintaining Ride as a going concern. This is is third solo album under his own name however, following on from 2020’s The View From Halfway Down and Flicker, released two years later.

The difference this time is that it’s comprised entirely of new material, as opposed to it’s predecessors on which long standing ideas had been reshaped. It also lay dormant and unfinished for a period, until an unanticipated chain of events set the wheels in motion for it to be feverishly completed.

The twist of fate concerns Pinball Wanderer’s best song I’m In Love, a reworking of a 1981 “Proto shoegaze” cult track by The Passions. Offered it to remix, Neu! guitarist Michael Rother instead put his own stamp on, prompting Bell to bring all of the album’s material to a finished state in the course of one very late night session.

Of the rest there are plenty of genre skips, from the indie jangle of opener Panic Attack to Madder Rose’s fragmentary dream pop, but it’s the skittling Madchester vibe of Apple Green UFO – with beats supplied by Oasis’ Gem Archer – that lasts longest in the memory. Andy Bell, drift? there isn’t an anchor big enough.

You can read a full review here.