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The Secret Goldfish – Empty Holster (Creeping Bent/Last Night from Glasgow)

As the Creeping Bent Organisation winds down operations after thirty years on the frontline of art/pop interface, it is only fitting that one of its swan song releases gets back to its roots. As one of the label’s mainstays from the start, The Secret Goldfish do this on their fourth opus through a collection of cover versions guest-starring a posse of fellow travellers. As a work in progress on the go since 1996, the result is a delirious pop mash-up of influence and homage that joins several generations of assorted rock family tree type dots while still sounding every inch The Secret Goldfish.

 

Much of this is down to vocalist Katy Lironi, who takes songs by Vic Godard, ex Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk and Fire Engine turned Sexual Object Davy Henderson and makes them her own. There is something Proustian too hearing Lironi sing the Shop Assistants’ mournful Somewhere in China, Godard’s Stop That Girl and Henderson’s Nectarine No 9 era 22 Blue with a cast list that includes Godard and Kirk themselves.

 

Released on vinyl, the twelve cuts also include a brand new song, Louche Life, written with Lironi’s partner in life and art Douglas MacIntyre, plus Elevator, a long lost collaboration with Jim Beattie of Adventures in Stereo. This all makes for a perfect primer, both of The Secret Goldfish and the leftfield indy-pop landscape that sired to make a parallel universe soopergroop variety show to treasure. 


The List, June 2025

 

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