This little ditty dropped into my Spotify Release Radar playlist this week. It’s from a new double album release called Little Eden, and it reminded me that The Bevis Frond has not yet featured in these pages.
The theme of the album, if there is one, is illustrated by the photographs of crumbling British housing estates on the album cover and in the promotional videos. Paradise not yet lost but unquestionably decaying.
… like Ray Davies coming down as he muses on the collapse of British tradition and traditionalism
Fire Records website
The music is undemanding, but there’s sharp observation in the lyrics. Is the gardener who mows his suburban lawn every Saturday the last vestiges of an obsolete way of life? Or is he a lush green shoot that promises a sustainable future for humanity and the road back to the Biblical garden?
The album’s title track is another regretful look back to the unbounded optimism of the 50s and 60s. It was a time when technology was about to solve all of society’s problems; soon we would all be living in our own little Eden.
I heard it’s getting hard to breathe
Little Eden by The Bevis Frond
In little Eden.
The Bevis Frond is, essentially, Nick Saloman and his gigging band. Some of Nick’s songs have a generous dollop of whimsy, so this amusing pun seems an appropriate way to say farewell to the man sitting among the succulents:
An anthropologist was cataloging south american folk remedies with the assistance [of] a local tribal elder who indicated the leaves of a particular fern were the best cure for constipation. The anthropologist had doubts.
punstoppable website
But the elder insisted, “with fronds like these, you don’t need enemas.”
Crotchety Man 
Never heard of them until now but I quite enjoyed the tracks I’ve listened to so far. The guitars are nice and Saloman puts some good lyrics together, Thanks for the introduction.
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