Album: Tim Rose

Judging by producer Colin Winston-Fletcher's sleevenote, the late Tim Rose could be a curmudgeonly type to work with - producing Rose in his final year was "like trying to tame a lion with a rubber chair", an image every bit the equal of any in these 10 songs. Rose was best known for his late-Sixties apocalyptic protest anthems like "Come Away Melinda" and his definitive version of Bonnie Dobson's "Morning Dew", but he was rather wrong-footed when the world failed to end as anticipated, and his pessimism proved unwelcome among the glitz and excess of the Seventies. He fell about as low as a man can go in the Eighties - even becoming a stockbroker at one point - before the support of celebrity fans like Robert Plant and Nick Cave prompted a comeback in the Nineties. These final recordings are a grumpily engaging collection of murder ballads, fulminations against a heartless deity, and bi-polar analyses - alternately bitter and regretful - of his failed marriage ("I can almost make it alone/ Threw out her dresses/ Tore out the phone"), set to mostly spare guitar arrangements. The most interesting piece, though, is the title-track, an atmospheric monologue recited over sheets of synth noise in the grizzled baritone that secured Rose valuable advert voiceover work during his lean years. A piquant swansong.