ENGLISH BOY WONDERS

In its original incarnation, English Boy Wonders represented a bit of a stumbling block for Big Big Train - the first of many instances where it seemed like the Train would derail altogether. In this case, it was a combination of the infamous "difficult second album" syndrome combined with some rather adverse circumstances.

Their debut, Goodbye To the Age of Steam, was a highly accomplished release which might not have set the world on fire at the time, but did at least get something of a decent reception. However, as the band tell it the critical positivity (and the Japanese release) somehow didn't translate to financial rewards for themselves; in the mid-1990s they were in a rather precarious place on the money front, and as a small label Giant Electric Pea were limited in the support they could offer (though label co-founder, Martin Orford of IQ fame, does appear as a guest on this album).

English Boy Wonders was originally recorded over 1995 and 1996, a process prolonged by the fact that the band couldn't afford to give it their full attention. It would release in 1997 in a form that the band insist was incomplete - the budget just wasn't there to let them finish the thing. Lacklustre sales would see the band dropped by GEP at this point, and the patchy nature of the original release would result in lacklustre reviews.

The most easily available version of the album these days, however, is not the original 1997 release: in 2008, the band would revisit the master tapes, remix them, switch up the running order, and rerecord some parts in order to yield a version of the release that better reflected their intentions. That's the version I've heard, and to my ears it really isn't that much of a step down from Goodbye To the Age of Steam, reflecting a similar mix of modern melodic indie rock and classic prog influences into a new fusion.

Think of it as a neo-prog of the 1990s - just as Marillion and others presented prog palatable to a pastel 1980s playground, here Big Big Train present a style that balances the sounds of the 1990s and the prog of yesteryear, along with perhaps a pinch of 1960s influence - there's some absolutely gorgeous vocal harmonies here, and a touch of organ at the start of A Giddy Thing which feels rather reminiscent of early proto-prog and psychedelia. I'm not in a position to closely compare the reworked version of the album with the original, but I could certainly imagine this making a splash in 1997 had it only enjoyed better promotion and had it only been completed in its final form then.

Whilst I don't think it's on the level of their debut album, English Boy Wonders certainly doesn't deserve to be an overlooked release in the band's discography, at least not when the 2008 tidy-up of the album has revealed such depths.