Stephen Cummings: A New Kind of Blue (True Tone/EMI, 1989)


In 1990 I was kind of dating a girl that worked in the same department store as me. She had long red hair and looked perfectly at home in Laura Ashley prints and I was pretty certain I was in love.

I had a copy of Stephen Cummings's A New Kind of Blue. It was a fairly new acquisition; one of about seventeen CDs I owned at that early stage in my move from vinyl and hissy, dubbed cassettes for the car. I played the album for her when she was over one night. She looked at me like I'd trod on her toes when she heard the cheesy faux-trumpet opening of "When the Day is Done", but with "Screwed Up State of Affairs" she was being drawn in by the casual elegance of Cummings's delivery, and by "When Love Comes" She was hooked. We listened to the album twice more before turning in. The next day I gave it to her.

Stephen Cummings is one of those musicians that seems to have always been around; not standing on the perifary, but not garnering the string-of-hits success that passes for a measure of talent, either. I suspect that part of the problem is that Stephen Cummings is too smart for his own good. In Australia we like our singers the same way we like our footballers: fabulously successful, inordinantly wealthy regular guys.

Cummings is moderately (probably comfortably) successful - his songs still make rotation on the radio; he hasn't gone into real estate - and on the face of it, he's a regular guy. But listen to his lyrics - and their world-weary, heart-mended delivery - and the sheer brilliance starts to creep through.

I was trying to figure out where it all went wrong
You said, hey but you're so headstrong
You're way off groove
You can't make a move
Without screwing up
That's what you're doing
(from "Screwed Up State of Affairs")

It creeps up behind you and whacks you over the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper. Those rhymes should be hokey. Instead, they're the expression of a man having a laugh at his own expense, at his own tragedy. Cummings is possibly the closest thing to a Leonard Cohen that Australia has produced. Robert Graves once said, "There's no money in poetry; but then again, there's no poetry in money, either."

We dated for a couple of months before she decided I didn't fit in the life she was making for herself. But before it ended I took her out to a little hole-in-the-wall called Club Foote, and we sat at a little table and drank a couple of beers and listened to Stephen Cummings and his truncated band play two sets of about an hour and a half each. It was probably a conspiracy between the music, the beer and the romantic palpatations of my own heart, but that night is one of my favourite live-show memories. I still wonder, now and again, if she I come to mind when she listens to that album.

She does.