Nicky Minay

Fauré’s songs represent his art at its most radiant, demonstrating the composer’s exceptional gift for melody as well as his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of the greatest French poets of the day.

Fauré’s songs represent his art at its most radiant, demonstrating the composer’s exceptional gift for melody as well as his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of the greatest French poets of the day.

With 2016 having marked the 25th anniversary of Nicky Holland (her solo debut, released June 1991) and 2017 occasioning the 20th anniversary of Sense and Sensuality (released June 1997), singer/songwriter/pianist/composer/arranger Nicky Holland (whose resume includes Tears For Fears, Fun Boy Three and creating scores for John Hughes films) sensed that now was “an appropriate time to re-evaluate” those albums and assemble Nobody’s Girl, the definitive retrospective of her solo work as a recording artist for Epic Records.

Or perhaps a better title might have been The Counter-revolutionary Piano of Nicky Hopkins. For, although Nicky had already established himself as one of the greatest rock and R&B pianists in Britain via numerous sessions, this 1966 instrumental LP was dominated by easy listening arrangements of standards. Despite the production credit of Shel Talmy (Who, the Kinks), what sets the tone are the period lite soundtrack orchestration (by David Whitaker) and wordless backup vocals (by the Mike Sammes Singers). It's candlelight music with a desperately trendy edge, far removed indeed from the Who's My Generation album (which both Hopkins and Talmy had worked on extensively around this time). Nicky Hopkins doing "Goldfinger," "Love Letters," and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore"? Yep, with MOR arrangements of "Satisfaction" and "Yesterday" thrown in for good measure. It's nothing more than a curio, though with the massive easy listening revival of the mid-'90s, its day may have finally come; indeed, it was reissued on CD by Columbia in the U.K.

The Tin Man Was a Dreamer Review by Bruce Eder
Nicky Hopkins' finest solo album, the memorably titled The Tin Man Was A Dreamer is a solid piece of engagingly edgy pop-rock – picture Elton John's early '70s work with more variety, a few rough edges, and a bit less ego. As one would expect, Hopkins' piano playing (augmented by the organ in spots) dominates most of the songs, but there's ample room for strong contributions from George Harrison (working as "George O'Hara") on lead and slide guitar on four of the tracks, and Mick Taylor on lead and acoustic guitars on four tracks; the rest of the band includes Klaus Voormann on bass and Bobby Keys on sax, as well as future Tubes alumnus Prairie Prince on drums.

A major statement by a composer still in his mid-twenties, Alex Woolfs Requiem, composed in 2018, combines powerful expressive immediacy with an impressive ability to synthesize the diverse traditions that have grown up around the requiem genre in the past two hundred years, as it has moved from the church into the concert hall.

Nicky Holland's "debut" album - titled, uncannily, "Nicky Holland" - is her first, but it comes after 10 years of working on virtually everybody else's. Holland is among pop's most flexible hired hands. Tears for Fears, Lloyd Cole, Cyndi Lauper, Oleta Adams, Ryuichi Sakamoto… they've all called her in to arrange strings, or assist with a tune, or sing backing vocals, or set up orchestral parts, or play some piano. She's an all-purpose musical troubleshooter. If you're David Byrne, and you need some folk songs from the Bahamas transcribed, then Nicky Holland is your woman.