The Brighton Port Authority – I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat

This is a compilation album with a series of collaborations coordinated and produced by Norman "Fat Boy Slim" Cook and "Brighton-based producer" Simon Thornton. In an attempt, I would imagine, to make it seem like something a little more exciting and different than that, though, they have foisted an elaborate "concept" on the enterprise. The sleeve notes tell you that The BPA or Brighton Port Authority, to give it the full name, was a shadowy and mysterious musical project in the 1970s, whose recordings have only just been uncovered, and are now being released for the first time. Great detail is given into the circumstances surrounding the recordings and their loss and eventual uncovering, with quotes from some of the artists involved at the time.All tosh, of course, and some of the more obvious anachronisms are deliberately pointed out by "Thomas H Green", the author of these notes, when he points out, for example, that Iggy Pop, on the opening track here, "recorded a version of The Monochrome Set's debut single ... four years before The Monochrome Set wrote it." Knowing, and mildly entertaining tosh, then, but really, all this peripheral stuff is just window dressing. How good is the actual content?As with most such compilations, the contributions vary. Perhaps the biggest gun (pun intended...) is deployed on the opening track (and forthcoming single) with the aforementioned Iggy Pop cover of 'He's Frank'. This sees Iggy do his deep-macho-voiced Iggy thing with a sparky dance-friendly backing, and makes for an enjoyable kick-start to the album. Other tracks that I enjoyed included 'Jumps The Fence' by Connan Mockasin, a surreal tale where Cook deploys a favourite trick of taking one phrase or riff (in this case the lyric "Jumps the toad like a fence") and beating it into submission by dint of constant repetition. Mockasin's pronounced New Zealand accent works well and makes this song just seem somehow a little more interesting than it might otherwise sound.'Toe Jam' comes off like a missing Talking Heads track, which is unsurprising given that it features the vocals of one David Byrne, but it is nice hearing the slightly incongruous combination of Byrne and Dizzy Rascal, the other contributor. Emmy The Great does a cute, breezy, Joni Mitchell-style turn on 'Seattle' (assisted by Jack Penate on backing vocals, who also gets a guitar credit on the Iggy track), and 'Should I Stay Or Should I Blow' (featuring house DJ Ashley Beedle) is a pleasant, if undemanding, sunny, cheesy ska-lite party track.On the debit side, however, is Justin Robertson's track 'Island', in which each verse features a vocal that starts out like Bono at his most over-sincere, and finishes like a bad Bowie imitation. Jamie T, meanwhile, seems to have metamorphosised into a Stars In Their Eyes version of Pete Doherty, on 'Local Town'. Strange. The sultry 'Superman' (Simon Thornton) also left me a little cold, and equally inoffensive yet ultimately forgettable was Cagedbaby's 'Superlover'.In all then, I'd say honours are about even between "half decent contributions" and "odd / dull / shoddy contributions". The songs included don't, for the most part, sound as if any attempt has been made to carry on the whole "lost 70s recordings" conceit, by which I mean that they don't sound particularly of that era. This is a moderately interesting compilation album that would work well, say, as a soundtrack to a summer party, but it didn't (dreadful pun approaching... alert! alert!) particularly float my boat, whether smaller or bigger. 54%The BPA. on Myspace