the basque scootering circus

Este es la opera prima de Andy Lewis: Billion Pound Project. Es una vuelta a los iniciales años del modernismo (mod culture) a través de las siguientes voces: Bettye Lavette, Keni Burke, Fonchi, Loleatta Holloway, Dave Jay, The Exciters, Andy Ellison, Lynda Laurence and Reg King.

Ha sido reeditado tanto en Cd como en vinilo. Una joya que merece estar en cualquier colección que se precie.

SIDE ONE
1 The Secret Life Of AJ Lewis
2 100 Oxford St. (featuring Dave Jay)
3 (Love Is) Alive In My Heart (featuring Keni Burke)
4 Laughter Ever After (featuring Bettye Lavette)
5 Since I Lost My Baby (featuring Reg King)
6 Looking Up, Looking In (featuring Dave Jay)
7 See You There (featuring Lynda Laurence)

SIDE TWO
8 Billion Pound Project
9 Soul Chancer (featuring The Exciters)
10 Till I Lost You (featuring Reg King)
11 Devastated (featuring Loleattta Holloway)
12 Heather Lane (featuring Andy Ellison)
13 One By One (featuring Fonchi)
14 When It All Goes Wrong (featuring Dave Jay)


...The man was tall and unconventionally handsome. He had regular features that suggested hot blood and a cool temper. He was an athletic six-foot and dressed in the sort of casual, well-cut herringbone tweed that pointed towards an ease of bearing in either town or country. He wore a white sea-island cotton shirt with a red windsor knot. "Indeed," thought the Director, "this man has the perfect credentials to take on the Billion Pound Project...From the opening orchestral strains of "The Secret Life Of AJ Lewis" with its soaring Merlin Supercharged engine high above the cliffs at Dover evoking pastoral images of a Vaughan-Williams wartime suite this album, like its creator and composer, wears its heart on its sleeve.Andy Lewis is the quintessential English gentleman. That dying breed who mix style and eccentricity with equal aplomb. Originally a groundbreaking DJ on the London soul scene, he was one of the originators of the Britpop explosion (first as the resident at The Laurel Tree, the Camden pub where the scene first surfaced - and later as Blur's DJ). He started his career as a musician with the highly touted art-band Pimlico and graduated to producer and member of indie chart-toppers Spearmint.Back in the summer of 2003 he approached us with a germ of an idea which eventually flowered into the Billion Pound Project. Lewis had decided to construct a studio album around his musical heroes and the result is a loose collective of like-minded souls who help bring his creations to life in a uniquely British way.People like the legendary UK soul man Reg King, whose band The Action were described by none other than Sir George Martin as 'the best British soul group, bar none'; Andy Ellison, the firecracker who fronted sixties anarcho-art-pop outift John's Children alongside Marc Bolan, and Keni Burke, a Curtis Mayfield prodigy who hit number one in the US R and B charts with his funk hit 'Rising To The Top'. There's super-soul-divas Bettye LaVette and Lolletta Holloway, northern soul stompers The Exciters, ex-Supreme Lynda Lawrence and a whole host of musical hustlers, from the sixties right up to the modern day.The Billion Pound Project is a document, no, a testament to the forces that drive it's creator. From an obtuse fascination with 6Ts modernism, by way of Harlod Wilson's vision of Britain's 'white heat of technology', right the way through to a modern-day Londoner's soul sensibilities.One foot in the past with an eye on the future. (Ed Piller, Summer 2005)album artwork by Lora Finlay

http://www.acidjazz.co.uk/; www.andylewis.info