I've written about Sam Inglis and The Morning People quite a bit already on this site, but my enthusiasm directs me to write some more. Of all the songwriters I've come across - and there have been quite a few - Sam Inglis is certainly the most underrated. He is also one of the very best. Certainly I'd put him in my all-time top ten. How splendid, then, that he lives in Cambridgeshire and is alive and writing and singing right now. And how splendid, too, that he's got a good band to perform his songs with him: namely, of course, The Morning People.

Apart from the Teach Yourself Songwriting book - which includes three Inglis songs on a CD as part of the purchase - this is the only official release to date. But, whoopee, I hear that a full-length Morning People CD is in the offing. Meanwhile you can treat yourself to these three classics (but then, all the Inglis/Morning People songs are classics).

Musically, The Morning People play catchy, country-tinged pop-rock. But the songs are the thing, and most especially the lyrics. At home, I've been playing these tracks over and over again - if they weren't so good I'd worry that my CD player was getting sick of them.

Inglis' themes are always interesting, original, above merely quirky, and Inglis' angles of approach even more so. The best way to illustrate this is to quote:

They Did Something:

Children's TV became
For Timmy Mallett
A good way
To display his undoubted natural talent
For grating wackiness
Which culminated
In a hit
With Itsy-Bitsy Tinsey-Wincey Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini
His glasses had red rims
But the kids still hated him
And on reflection they were almost certainly right
But he did something with his life.

We could die today
And be forgotten
And never meet the public eye
Well you can hide away
From cruel laughter
Or you can do something with your life.

My Christian Friend:

She's the kettle I'm the pot
She's found a calling; I have not
She's moved on to a higher plane
And she's not coming back again
She does a lot of work for charitable causes
She has the energy of fifty wild horses

She makes me feel like a bad person
She makes me feel like a bad person
She makes me feel that I'm worth nothing at all

The Hardest Word (which also features on the Smell The Bicycle compilation of tracks by various local artistes)

The hardest word is just five letters long
If you believe the works of Elton John
But he and Bernie never tried
To get ‘sulphanilimide' into a song
It wouldn't have belonged

I wasn't even drunk when I said
What I said
I didn't even have a bad excuse
It wasn't you deserved abuse

As you can read, lateral humour and lateral seriousness combine most deftly. These three songs are every bit as great as the rest of the Ingles/Morning people oeuvre, as I've already implied. But, good as they are per se, the words need the music. That's where purchasing this ‘EP' comes in. I'd be amazed if you do so and regret it.

To obtain The Morning People Are Not For The Likes Of You contact sam@themorningpeople.com.

Writer: Rychard Carrington