Bill Pritchard – A Trip to the Coast

Staffordshire-born songwriter Bill Pritchard has been releasing music intermittently since the eighties, though if the name doesn’t ring bells it’s probably because his successes have mostly occurred across the channel. A Trip to the Coast is his first album in 9 years, and while it’s tempting to read dashed dreams into the line “I sometimes wonder how it could be/ if I’d been more commercial”, the music’s mellow tenor suggests no hard feelings regarding the homeland snub.

Pritchard’s Anglo-French background is conveyed through bilingual lyrics (mostly English à l’exception de Tout Seul) and tracks named for both Paris and, somewhat less grandly, a suburb of Stoke-on Trent. The fact that the latter is treated with just as much tender affection as the former indicates a lot about Pritchard’s agreeably romantic worldview, and while his understated guitar pop is possibly too lightweight to inspire more than a passing fancy, it’s a breezy pleasure while it lasts.