Full Review

Jez Lowe & the Bad Pennies – Wotcheor

Billed as a ‘a different sort of album’, it certainly has a ‘different sort of album cover’, but once you get past Jez in a blazer and boater, you get to an album from Jez and his Bad Pennies that is as full of character and heart anything you’ll ever hear. The 18 songs, all written by Jez, are inspired by and feature the people and culture of his native North East, the difference comes from the presentation, where he pays homage to the legendary 1950s BBC Radio show ‘Wot Cheor Geordie’.
In the flesh this means the ‘normal’ songs are interspersed with short radio-like jingles that add all him to cram some great one-liners into short snippets, memorably the 35 seconds of ‘Sale’ pack in a couple of great lines and worked around a play on words.
‘Wotcheor’ was a much used welcome greeting (derived from ‘What Cheer?’), and was used for the title of the radio show that featured songs, story-tellers, personalities and stories of the region, and that’s the loose framework Jez has taken for the songs of this excellent album.
As with many of his albums, the songs here are a mixture of social commentary and humour, and on a few songs the lines are blurred with the humour barely hiding the pathos in the underlying story. In a collection of great songs ‘The Judas Bus’ and ‘It’s a Champion Life’ stand out as well crafted songs, with the latter setting the scene before building up to a fantastic punchline!
This is a Jez and Bad Pennies album, so Kate Bramley, Andy May and David De La Haye provide the instrumental support, but as is appropriate for this disc, he’s joined by a number of local artists including The Young ‘Uns, Hinny Pawsey and Benny Graham – it all adds up to a rich sounding and fully formed album full of variety across its 18 songs.