ANNETTE PEACOCK - I Have No Feelings LP Orig Ironic Records Robert Wyatt

$

50

ARTIST: Annette Peacock
TITLE: I Have No Feelings
YEAR: 1986
LABEL: Ironic Records
CONDITION: EX / EX Very Nice Clean Copy
DETAILS: Annette Peacock has the name of a rock star. (It’s not an assumed name, but not her given one, either—she married the jazz bassist Gary Peacock and kept the excellent moniker after they split.) What’s more, when I meet her, she talks like a rock star: “Mick Ronson told me the air was good in Woodstock, so I moved there.” And, as all her album covers from the nineteen-seventies to the present make clear, she has the look of one, too. Even so, when I interview this elusive singer-songwriter after one of her rare concerts, she says, “I lack confidence.” I point out that her career—a series of big swerves made up of innumerable small ones—indicates the opposite. “Oh I’m brave,” she says. “I always have been. But confidence and bravery are distinct.” And what all the stars she’s known have, she continues, is “confidence.” “Sometimes that’s all they have?” I suggest, but Peacock has already moved on to another thought, just as she does in her songs.

I was introduced to Peacock’s music by a guitarist friend in Spain, Ibon Errazkin, who said to me, “It sounds like a person thinking. The way the songs unfold reminds me of the way our inner thoughts develop inside our heads, and perhaps that’s what makes them sound so intimate and personal—almost like something that is prior to making oneself heard.” My wife, Naomi, and I were having lunch at Ibon’s apartment, in Madrid, on a day off during a tour, and he was playing us Peacock’s albums from the eighties. “I go through periods when the only music that makes sense is hers—any other music just sounds frivolous,” he said. Ibon is a marvellous d.j. and guitarist, and he had selected this music for our lunch with care. “What records can I play them that they probably don’t know but might really, really love?” he had asked himself. He was right on both counts. It wasn’t surprising that he could divine our taste; he has done that many times before. But how was it that we had never heard these records?

When we got home from the tour, I quickly learned that a big reason was lack of availability. None of Peacock’s albums from the eighties are in print on any physical format, nor are they available on the major streaming platforms. If you look up Annette Peacock on Spotify, you’ll find three albums from the seventies and one from 2000, but nothing in between. There are very real gaps in the streaming catalogue, and Annette Peacock’s brave records from the eighties have been swallowed by one.