Hector Gannet The Great Shakedown

Tracks: The Great Shakedown, Let It Pour, Seven Signs, Boat In The Bottle, Full Circle, Big White Telephone, The Mother Tongue, The Jetty's End, A Stitch In The Fold, No Money, No Time (The Great Reprise)

Label: Guga Records

Some bands just have a knack for making music that feels like it belongs to a particular place. Hector Gannet do exactly that on The Great Shakedown, drawing heavily on their home town of North Shields and its long connection with the sea and shipbuilding.

There’s a real sense of history running through this album, but it never feels like the band are simply looking backwards. Instead, these songs celebrate the people who have built their lives around the town, while acknowledging the struggles and sacrifices that come with it. There’s anger here, certainly, but also plenty of warmth and hope. At times, The Great Shakedown sounds like a heartfelt tribute to a community; at others, it feels like a call for that same community to stand up and be counted.

Musically, the album is a fascinating mix of old and new. Everything sounds clean and well put together, yet there’s a timeless quality to the songs that makes it difficult to pin them down to any particular decade. The brass arrangements bring a touch of classic Motown, with occasional hints of the polished pop sounds of the 1980s. Add in church bells, big choirs and a healthy dose of folk-rock atmosphere, and you have something that feels quite different from much of what's around today.

Hector Gannet might be labelled a folk-rock band, but there’s a lot more going on here than acoustic guitars and catchy choruses. Aaron Duff’s songwriting takes in everything from Celtic folk to jazz, blues and big, sweeping rock songs, giving the album plenty of variety without ever making it feel disjointed.

The Big White Telephone is a great example of the band’s willingness to take a different direction. With its laid-back, jazzy feel, it has the atmosphere of a late-night bar, complete with dim lighting and a drink in hand. It’s a welcome change of pace from some of the album’s bigger, more urgent moments, and shows that the band can pull off a more understated approach just as well as a full-blown anthem.

There are also moments that bring early Waterboys records such as A Pagan Place to mind. Songs like The Jetty’s End and Boat in the Bottle have that same combination of spiritual yearning, Celtic influences and a slightly otherworldly atmosphere. The sea is never far away, either, with its imagery running through the album in ways that feel natural rather than forced. These tracks have a real sense of space and movement, as though the music itself is being carried out towards the horizon.

For all the different sounds and influences on display, though, it’s the honesty of the songwriting that really makes The Great Shakedown work. You get the feeling that Duff and the band aren't just writing about North Shields because it makes for an interesting subject. This is a place they know, and the lives they sing about are ones they understand. That connection gives the album a genuine emotional weight that would be difficult to replicate without having some real attachment to the people and places involved.

The Mother Tongue is one of the record’s standout moments. With its open-road imagery and the line “I’ll put the headlights on / gonna drive without a destination”, it captures that familiar feeling of wanting to get out into the world and see where life takes you. It’s an uplifting, instantly likeable song with a chorus that sticks around long after it finishes. For all the thoughtfulness elsewhere on the album, this one has the sort of broad appeal that could easily earn it a place on mainstream radio.

Seven Signs is another highlight, combining a lively rock ’n’ roll sound with lyrics that take a much darker look at working life. The image of “the worker waiting to die” is a sobering one, particularly when set against such an upbeat, driving arrangement. It’s this contrast that makes the song so effective, turning frustration into something you can sing along to rather than simply sit and dwell on.

A Stitch in the Fold shows off yet another side of the band. Blending pop, blues and jazz influences, it has a slightly offbeat charm that recalls The Beautiful South. There’s a cleverness to the arrangement, but it never gets in the way of the song itself. Instead, it’s the sort of track that reveals a little more with each listen, and another example of how comfortably Hector Gannet move between different styles.

One of the things that makes The Great Shakedown so appealing is that it manages to be thoughtful without becoming too heavy, and ambitious without losing its sense of fun. Albums with such a strong regional identity can sometimes struggle to reach beyond their immediate audience, particularly overseas, where the history and cultural background might be less familiar. But while North Shields is at the heart of this record, you don't need to know the town to appreciate what the band are getting at.

The themes here — work, family, belonging, hardship and the need to keep going — are hardly exclusive to one corner of England. And with its mix of big choruses, brass, folk-rock textures and more unexpected musical detours, the album offers plenty for listeners to get their teeth into.

Best of all, Hector Gannet never seem tempted to smooth away the details that make them distinctive. They have their own story to tell, and they tell it with enough confidence and personality to make you want to hear more. The Great Shakedown feels connected to a long musical tradition, but it doesn't sound like a band simply trying to recreate someone else's glory days.

Instead, this is a record with its own character: proud of where it comes from, unafraid to tackle difficult subjects and full of songs that can move you just as easily as they can get you singing along. Hector Gannet have struck an impressive balance between heartfelt storytelling and genuine pop appeal, and The Great Shakedown is all the better for it. It's a cracking album that deserves to find an audience well beyond the shores that inspired it.