A review, by Andy Farquarson, Get Rhythm

On the release and promotional tour of Fairy Stories, 2003

“It’s not often one discovers something obscure, new and tantalisingly excellent as Diego Brown and the Good Fairy and their unlikely pot pourri of invention. Kate, small and dressed in a shabby wedding gown bedecked with red plastic flowers (”Red because red roses say so much more / roses of red, lest we should forget”), plays accordion, handheld keyboard, swannee whistle and various percussive thingies. Adam, darkly dapper, whippet-thin, and sometimes sporting a white plastic stetson, is undoubtedly a skilful guitarist though he hides his lights under an FX pedal.

What brought me out to hear them? Trading as The Good Fairy Outfit, the pair have home-produced an album in which a few dodgy moments are more than offset by consistently rewarding music spiked with flashes of genius. Recorded in a little multi-track composing suite, the siblings play everything: bass, drums, guitars, various keyboards, and a range of other barely-identifiable oddities. There is probably a banjo in the mix somewhere but I can’t be sure, especially as Adam revealed that what I took to be a mandolin was “just me playing a guitar to sound like a mando”.

The thirteen songs positively drip with references and influences. A vocal fill here (”I can see clearly now the rain has gone” in a piece about a weather man); a lampoon of a clichéd power chord there; snatches of top twenty hits one moment, of punk stylisation the next. Despite its arcane facade, this wonderful album exudes a finely-honed pop sensibility. Much of the duo’s self-penned material is as surreal and witty as the Bonzos’. Like Stanshall’s, the lyrics turn the everyday on its head or morph tragedies into grotesqueries. Look Basil, There Goes the Titanic (”chilling out below decks / with loads and loads of ice / while the band played Yellow Submarine / completely out of time”) is introduced to the strain of Sailing By.

In Dog in Brownian Motion W5, the scatological imagery of the cleverly tongue-twisting rhymes rivals Ian Dury. Or take Little Creatures: it’s groove, its bassline, and its vocal treatment are what Talking Heads might have produced had David Byrne been raised in Brum on a mixed diet of edgy pop and the Light Program.

Diego/Adam is a gymnastic singer with a surprisingly wide range, strong above the stave while growlily steady in the low-tenor-to-baritone. Kate’s Souxsie-esque punk inflection and chanted mezzo counterpoints are a perfect foil to her brother’s vocal leads. And I assume it is she who bakes the fairy cakes which are handed out to the audience, their little guttering candles to be waved like so many cigarette lighters in a stadium gig’s torch anthem.

With their bizarre stage act, snappy songs, and ears as much attuned to the surreal as to strong narrative, Diego Brown and the Good Fairy are a cult-in-the-making. They certainly deserve to be. I’d pay proper walking-about money for their must-have album.”

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