Charity Shop Treasure

£1.49 from Mapperley Oxfam - bargain! Maria McKee's second solo album from 1993 and a bit of a lost Americana classic. Ms McKee doing her usual sulky teenager act on the cover and channeling her inner diva within on an album much closer to Lone Justice than her slightly ill-fated attempts at more mainstream pop directions ('Show Me Heaven' excepted, of course...) I'd not heard this for ages (the tape is presumably somewhere in the loft box) but remembered it straight away and bought it home to listen to at teatime only to discover that it was even better than I remembered: a couple of rockers, a couple of Gram-type country weepies, a couple of Van Morrison covers and a couple of full-on, over-the-top, Joplinesque gut-wrenchers - fabulous stuff!