Just a few short sixteen years later, and faunch followed ‘Dive’ with ‘Venice & Beethoven’. By now it was just Michael on electric & acoustic guitars, and Andy on everything else (although Dave did mix a couple of the tunes). This album is even more varied than the last, and we even get the ska/2-tone of “Western Sky” to go with the rock out cover (more of that later). When Michael was asked to describe the album he came up with “What would happen if you took all the colours in XTC, 10cc, Kevin Gilbert, Human League, Prince, Richard Thompson, Devin Townsend Project, Porcupine Tree, Robert Palmer, King's X, Peter Gabriel and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (!), and mixed them all together? Would it inevitably become a steaming pile of funky fudge, or an inventive and curious kaleidoscope of contrasting musical hues?”
As with ‘Dive’, this just doesn’t sound like the work of a few independent musicians, but instead this comes across as people at the top of their field who are working in a studio with a world-class producer to make music that will be loved and known by millions. Instead, what we have are guys doing this in their spare time outside their day jobs, but creating music that has a wonderfully rich palette. This is incredibly infectious, and music that makes the listener smile from start to end, and isn’t that music is about? Shouldn’t it create an emotional reaction?
All the music has a high pop element, apart from the one cover version, a song that I have some relationship with. I was at one of the very first Credo gigs with Mike Varty on keyboards, up in Mansfield, when the guys suggested playing this song in the set to which Mike surprised everyone by saying that he didn’t know it! It was a song I discussed with Fish, asking him if he was ever going to get around to recording his own version only for him to burst out laughing and tell me that he had just done exactly that. But, the one version that everyone must stand up against is the original, when a Scotsman stood onstage in his white and black hooped shirt and told everyone that he was “The Faith Healer”. Given that much of the music until then has had a high electronic or funk element it was somewhat surprising for me when the well-known guitar chords started coming out the speakers. Andy starts with his voice behind the guitar, but then a second guitar comes in and dominance starts to be heard. They haven’t tried to copy it fully, but instead have put their own twist on it, yet they keep the keyboard soaring and powerful, just how they should be.
