Anthony Moore’s On Beacon Hill reviewed: a poet of modern melancholy looks back

He’s had a most curious career, has Anthony Moore. Now settled in Hastings, he spent decades living an itinerant life across Europe; a member of one of pop’s great trios, Slapp Happy, and a prodigious collaborator, he also seems to value having space and time to work alone. One gets the feeling Moore’s keen both to let some old songs home to roost – On Beacon Hill has him revisiting material from his recorded history with new musician friends – and to push ever forward, with new trios like AKA and OBTRAM3.

Indeed, it can be hard to trace the complex routes Moore has pursued over the decades. After dropping out of art school in Newcastle in the late ’60s, he travelled to the Hebrides, where a chance meeting with experimental film maker David Larcher led to Moore contributing to the soundtrack to Larcher’s first film, Mare’s Tail. Through this process, Moore became enamoured of the reel-to-reel recorder as the key tool in his musical armoury; these were what he calls the “ferrous oxide years”.

Moore ended up travelling around Europe, almost as a “soundtrack maker for hire”, in the early ’70s, before landing in Hamburg, where he met Uwe Nettelbeck, the journalist who was also the mastermind behind the German krautrock collective Faust. It was a fortuitous meeting, leading not only to three albums of hardcore minimalism – Pieces For The Cloudland Ballroom (1971), Secrets Of The Blue Bag (1972) and the shelved Reeds, Whistles And Sticks – but the formation of avant-pop trio Slapp Happy with Moore’s friend Peter Blegvad and then-partner Dagmar Krause.

Slapp Happy are perhaps the only group who can claim that, for a time, Faust were their rhythm section – their first two albums, Sort Of and Acnalbasac Noom, feature Jean-Hervé Peron and Werner “Zappi” Diermaier on bass and drums. On returning to England in 1973, Slapp Happy signed to Virgin, who had them re-record their second LP with session musicians.

Their meeting with labelmates Henry Cow, staunch Rock In Opposition operatives, led to two collaborative LPs and the eventual fracture of Slapp Happy; Moore returned to his solo muse. He’d been working on experimental film soundtracks across the decade (and beyond), notably for the remarkable German filmmakers Werner Nekes and Dore O.

Moore’s first solo album, 1976’s Out, was, again, shelved – an unfortunate pattern emerging – but was eventually released in its intended form by Drag City in 2020. 1979’s self-released Flying Doesn’t Help proves Moore’s capacity for elegant, disruptive pop-rock form, shot through with experimentation: it seems to make good on the genre’s word (rock’n’roll is avant-garde by nature, after all – it’s the intersection with commerce that neuters its power).

Moore worked on further solo albums across the 1980s, while also becoming lyricist and collaborator with the likes of Pink Floyd, Feargal Sharkey and Paul Young, his time close to the pop mainstream counterbalanced by the strangeness of his own songs. He disappeared from popular view across the next decades while working as a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne – but a recent return to music-making, and a contemporaneous wave of reissue action, has been most welcome, and has presented a new Moore: reflective but still sensitive to the pressures of the times; able effortlessly to integrate what he had once seen as the “two sides” of his creative endeavour, the experiment and the pop song.

For Moore, though, the pop song is a curious, malleable beast. In some ways he seems to treat the song itself, its structure, its fabric, its sonic properties, as tape itself, a reel of material to manipulate and re-contextualise. Hence the revisitations of On Beacon Hill, where Moore collapses history into so many vectors of possibility, pulling songs from his back catalogue – including a bravura, deeply moving reading of “No Parlez”, originally performed by Paul Young on his 1983 album of the same name – and setting them out to sea, each melody a bobbing paper boat skirling and swilling on a sea of texture.

Moore’s capacity to re-read his own material leads the songs to new, surprising conclusions. The divinely drilled Eno/Cale pop of 1979’s “Caught Being In Love” opens On Beacon Hill, completely denuded, as “Caught”; there are a few minor changes to the lyrics but the heart of the song is the same, and what welcome liberties Moore takes with its arrangement and its emotional tenor, its harried angst evacuated and replaced with a forlorn, wistful resignation.

“The Blistered Salver” takes spoken word and dots it across textures that are like worn airport tarmac; the guitar that tangles through “It’s Fear” rings gentle melancholy out of a melody that feels both ageless and guileless. Who knew? After all these years, full of deep passes through the heart of the mainstream, the underground, the experimental and the popular, Anthony Moore is back where he started: a troubadour on the move. Only now, he’s not travelling with Revoxes, he’s travelling with time.