There are the major releases, and then there are the odd releases by band members who are in bands and need to express or explore another area of their creativity. Colin Newman, the voice and one of the songwriters for the great British band Wire, made a solo album of instrumentals, Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish, some based on his older songs but mostly new to my ears in 1981. That was a good decade (the early 80s) for exploration by various musicians who were in groups and had the opportunity to make their own, and often experimental, albums. A sister or brother album to Colin Newman’s is Andy Partridge of XTC, who made a solo album, Take Away / The Lure Of Salvage, that was highly experimental but still has traces of his pop leanings. In the same family, both albums remind me of Paul McCartney’s first solo album, where he stepped away from The Fab Four to do a work where he had complete control. Colin Newman did all the instrumentation and produced the recordings except for one track.
Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish is not a great album, but it’s an interesting work in that it feels like you are reading a writer’s private journal. The first impression is that it is a series of demos since one can recognize the melodies that will be used on the first solo Newman album A-Z. So, it is either an afterthought or a companion piece to the first solo work. A-Z is fantastic, with a quirky pop style but artful songs, in the manner that we adore in Wire, so there was no significant change in music approach, but perhaps he was feeling his position in the world at that time.
The album is very much in the pop music format, such as side two of David Bowie’s Low and Heroes. It only seems unusual due to the juxtaposition of the one album's ‘song’ and ‘instrumental’ sides. Like Bowie’s instrumental work, Newman is very impressionistic but not ambient. One piece can be considered ambient, but this is very much an in-your-face type of music. It is part of the world of Wire and sounds like an off-shoot of that landscape. So if one is a fan of the early recordings of Wire (the first three albums), I would jump on and get/listen to Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish.
I bet this most resembles the 154 period of Wire -listening to it today the 15th song iis my favorite