Скачать или смотреть British author Mark Brend discusses singer/songwriter David Ackles with Joe Viglione on Visual Radio

Down River
In search of David Ackles
By Mark Brend

In 1972, David Ackles’s third album, American Gothic, was released to a flurry of UK and US press plaudits declaring it the album of the year. Melody Maker called the Bernie Taupin-produced set a classic. The Sunday Times described it as "the Sgt. Pepper of folk", suggesting that it heralded a whole new direction in music. The Los Angeles Free Press was effusive to an extent that it worried it had built the album up too much. A sentiment Ackles himself came to agree with. Rolling Stone declared Ackles an important artist and American Gothic “impressive and original”, saying it deserved a wide audience. But it didn’t get one. Like its two predecessors, American Gothic failed to sell, peaking at just 167 on the US charts.

After a fourth and final album in 1973 Ackles vanished. His first three albums reappeared on CD in the early 1990s yet were soon deleted. When Phil Collins selected an Ackles song on Desert Island Discs in 1993 his comment that Ackles had “kind of disappeared” seemed quite true. Ackles died a few years later without ever making another record.

Drawing on conversations with Ackles himself, members of his family, collaborators including Bernie Taupin, and archive material, Down River is a search for an artist who got lost. It positions Ackles as one of the great maverick talents of popular music—an equal of Scott Walker and Tom Waits—seeks to understand the disconnect between his obvious gifts and his commercial failure, and wonders about the fickleness of fame and cult status. How does this process of retrospective recognition work, and why does it happen for some but not others? Was Ackles’s music just too strange, or might his time yet come? And what do the answers to these questions say about the mythmaking of the popular music industry—and about us, the audience?


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