All Aboard by The Beavers

The comeback album – 3 years after the Beavers bid ‘Farewell Arbor Park’ and waved goodbye to the adoring hoards of fans, the band reconvened and sent out a shout of ‘All Aboard’ the good ship Beaver for one final voyage. The lads had not been idle in the intervening period and had put out new material under the offshoot monikers of ‘Project Mexico’ - The Beavers with Tom Parker as a fully fledged band member, playing an eclectic musical mixture with a laissez-faire attitude, and ‘Mitchell’s Fold’ - a heavy riffing cosmic rock power trio comprised of Japhy, Jobie and Tom.

And so it was that The Beavers came together in the summer of ‘98 to embark on their recording endeavours for one last time. The lads set sail on a long player journey that plotted a course of what had become their trademark catchy classic melodic pop, with splashes of pastoral folk, a sprinkling of country blues, and a dash of funk flavour. This time round recording took place at the Vaughan ancestral seat of The Tavern House in Montgomery, with The Roundhouse having been passed into new hands.

Lyrical inspiration came from the people and places they’d come across since having spread their wings. Proceedings took off with a ride in on a dark blues tipped hornet’s wing and a brush with El Diablo himself in ‘Just A Hornet Scorch Blues’. Along the way creatures of crustaceous features, scales and fins were encountered in ‘The Ballad of Tupney Barnapple’, and a close relative of the noble beaver happened upon in ‘The Roof Otters Tale’. The devil was countered in the uplifting ‘Halo Again’, but a more shadowy spirituality was experienced in the street hustlers' story of the funk inflected ‘High Priest Soul’. A fable of a greedy cookie thief was told in ‘The Biscuit Demon’, or was it all a mirage? And a meeting with a beautiful maker of fine bittersweet preserves documented in ‘My Marmalady’. A wandering man’s diversions were touched upon ‘In A Caravan’, and the travails of acquiring marching powder of the Bolivian variety were got at in ‘Gettin’ Bolivian Blues’. The travels of body and mind since the Beavers last album were put into song on ‘The Woodpecker Years’, and there were meditations on metropolitan life in ‘Natural Urban Unison’. But it all came back to where it had begun with ‘A Taste Of Shropshire’, and the Beavers finished their musical odyssey with a tribute to their home county of Salopia and the rural life.

In the fall of 1993 the meeting of 3 great musical minds took place when Professional Vaughan, Amateur Kirkpatrick and Saloon Wilson joined forces to meld the cult phenomenon of The Beavers. They cooked up a sublime sonic stew of lo-fi slacker indie, with a dollop of country twang, a chunk of grunge, a fair smattering of folk stylings, and a soupcon of metal frisson. Welcome to The Beavers