"With pulses racing, and eyes full of wonder…"

Filed by: Darren on November 24, 2006 at 18:30
Filed In: Music

I'm a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool, definite fan of New Model Army. Have been since I was about 16 and will be for the rest of my life. I thought I'd check their website this morning, see if they were doing their usual Yuletide UK tour this year (sadly, they're not, they're in the US instead and are only playing one UK show, in London).

Thunder and Consolation But I did find out that 'One Family, One Tribe', an exhibition of New Model Army memorabilia, is opening at the Salford museum on Monday, which is running through until January. Definitely one for the diary.

If it's set up anything like the version that travelled to Germany recently, the exhibition should include a wealth of NMA paraphenalia and some genuinely significant items, such as the original Ghost of Cain jacket, a selection of stage costumes down the years, plenty of artwork by artist, poet and novelist Joolz Denby, and... okay, unless you're a fellow NMAphile, you stopped reading about half a paragraph ago, didn't you?

In which case, you won't be particularly interested to learn that NMA front-man Justin Sullivan's solo album Navigating by the Stars [Amazon]
is probably one of my all-time top twenty, along with at least two other NMA offerings.

But on the other hand, if you're not a New Model Army fan yet, but are of a mind to check them out, I'd highly recommend their Thunder and Consolation [Amazon] album as the best starting point, then jumping ahead to The Love of Hopeless Causes [Amazon], Strange Brotherhood [Amazon], and Eight [Amazon], and then just blowing your next pay cheque on the rest of their back-list...