A charter member of the Beta Band who bailed long before the combo were even slightly well-known, the Fife-dwelling Scottish chap known only as Lone Pigeon has the bonged-out bedroom-born credentials. On his debut album Concubine Rice he dutifully mixes rambling skiffle-band silliness with postmodernist cut-and-paste jobs to give off a deliberately distant air of a lone nutter producing the most idiosyncratic sound. But, more impressively, Pigeon(!) seeks the inspiration of other lone-nutters of the songwritten past, effectively channelling Syd Barrett and Skip Spence as he, in the album's most effective moments, ditches the four-tracking track-flattening extra-instrument accoutrements to deliver the kind of fragile sad-'n'-lonely lonely-guy songsmithing that pulls heartstrings everywhere. In so doing, he still comes off as somewhat of a dilettante, these songs invariably being short, transient numbers thrown in as part of the record's stylistic potpourri. The artist lacks the discipline of someone like Richard Youngs, whose history as experimental musician means he is able to take a similar idea — the lonesome, iconoclast folkie — and meter it out with focused artistry and thematics. But applying that as criticism to Concubine Rice is a little like knocking an orange for being unlike an apple. The cobbled-together, often-incongruous one-man-band wanderings of the record are exactly the charms that it holds; the fact that songs as sweet as "Lonely Vagabond" are buried in the midst of a musical scrapbook are part of such charm.
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