One Buck Guy's Shadow Men of Pop Dept. - Martin Briley

Legacy Artwork by Th' Io'F© Department O' Fine Art Dept.

Charter Four Or Five Guy© One Buck Guy spent three lousy months scrimshawing this screed onto a Narwhal tusk as part of his rehab. The least you can do is read it. Is that too much to ask? What is wrong with you people?

First off, [begins One Buck Guy - Ed.] I had never heard of Martin Briley until very recently. Maybe you haven’t either, at least not consciously. When he published his first three records, including fluke hit “The Salt Of My Tears” in the early-to-mid 1980s I wasn’t yet part of the record-buying or even record-listening part of the population, and then the man and his beret disappeared for more than two decades from the eye of the public, starting a modest comeback by finally publishing another record in 2006. When I call him one of the shadow men of pop, that’s because he was for long stretches of his career, first as a performer, then as a songwriter. A behind the scenes presence on more records than you’d know or care to listen to, with credits that go in the hundreds. That one moment in the spotlight when “Salt” climbed into the top 40 and then got him tagged as a one-hit wonder (technically correct, unfair as it is) came after heaving away in the music industry for more than fifteen years, and after that brief moment of (semi) stardom, he returned to the grind for a prolific if completely behind-the-scenes career as a songwriter/songdoctor and composer for film and television.

Briley started out with one of the many UK psych bands that crowded the market place in the wake of the summer of love, Mandrake Paddle Steamer [left - Ed.], later shortened to just Mandrake. Mandrake Paddle Steamer only ever got to issue one single, a recorded album stayed unreleased at the time and was only issued in 2018. To my unwashed ears it sounds like pretty standard stuff for the time, style and the era, but I’m not at all an expert on that particular genre. Just Mandrake also went nowhere after a sole single was released exclusively in Sweden, so clearly world domination was out of the picture at this point. So Mandrake was kaput, though Briley continued to work with the band’s Brian Engel in a number of projects. One of these was an orchestral pop album for George Martin’s AIR label, that also got shelved and was finally released in 2007.

With Engel he worked as The Liverpool Echo and contributed to a number of other short-lived projects like Prowler and Starbuck, while also going into studio work as arranger, vocalist and guitar player for hire, collaborating with hit writer tandem Howard and Blakley, and also joined the BBC orchestra for an extended stay. He joined prog band Greenslade in 1974 for a short interlude, cut an instrumental slightly proggish album for Island, then the Ian Hunter Band for a couple of years in the late 70s.

Afterwards he was doing studio work with a ton of artists of all ilk, from Engelbert Humperdinck to Mick Jones. Looking at his clientele list you realize that Briley had no qualms about working with uncool and hopelessly MOR artists, including Cliff Richards, Olivia Newton-John and Tom Jones. This would become a topic for his later career from the mid-80s onwards as songwriter/songdoctor for everybody, from dozens of teenage bands/acts to Christian pop artist Rebecca St. James to the inevitable Celine Dion, not to mention out of left-field choices like Rosie O’Donnell or Nana Mouskouri and even Bill Wyman’s child bride Mandy Smith. He dryly notes on his website that he hasn’t heard most of the fruits of his labor for the teen acts and other “gun for hire” work. He also became a bit of a Jim Steinman mainstay, working with and for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler. That’s Briley playing the guitar on “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (though usually Rick Derringer gets credited for it).

But right there in the middle, just before attacking hundreds of songs, co-writes and commissions for music for TV and films, are his glory years, three albums from which I pulled the accompanying compilation. As a general rule, I prefer a “all killer, no filler” approach, so instead of wading through three albums with a rising amount of filler-ish tracks, here’s what I think are the best tracks from his run on Mercury records. I have a clear preference for his debut album, Fear Of the Unknown, which sounds still amazingly fresh forty years later. It has a pretty obvious New Wave influence, with a faint hint of the Cars sound, but Briley makes it work fabulously without ever seeming to imitate someone else. His singing voice isn’t particularly distinctive, sometimes reminding you a bit of Peter Gabriel (he’s a dead ringer on “Heart of Life”) and to me personally of Men At Work’s Colin Hay. What is clearly distinctive, though, is his songwriting with a decidedly unique point of view on such tracks as “I Feel Like A Milkshake” or “School for Dogs” with its delightful double entendre use of the expression “man’s best friend”. Even on some of the later, more conventional tracks his pop smarts and craftsmanship are undeniable and no doubt contributed to the subsequent demand for him as songwriter for hire.

This is glorious pop, intelligent and quirky, but not with such an amount of mannered quirk that it threatens to derail songs, like, say, some of what Lindsay Buckingham was doing at the same time. Like Buckingham, Briley is also somewhat inspired by 60s pop, as on “It Shouldn’t Heard that Much” with its doo-wop style backing vocals and even throws in a tribute to his prog days on “Fear Of The Unknown”, again complete with Peter Gabriel-styled vocals. The production gets slicker throughout the album trilogy, while the songs overall probably get weaker. Some of the demos he cut during that time recall the freshness of the debut with their slightly more rudimentary, but also more immediate sound. As such, the accompanying comp breaks down as having eight tracks from the debut, four each from the follow-ups and four demos from the time frame. So let the shadow man step into the limelight for a moment...