IAN MCNABB
THE ROAD TO UTOPIAN
He’s collaborated with Crazy Horse, Ringo Starr and even auditioned for Brookside, but now Icicle Works founder and current solo artist Ian McNabb is ready to conclude his latest trilogy.
Words: Rob Hughes
KEVIN CUMMINS/GETTY;
Ian McNabb has been revisiting his past of late. Namely the first flush of The Icicle Works, the dashing alt.rock trio he co-founded in Liverpool in 1980. “When I listen back, I’m impressed by how musical and how technical it sounds,” he marvels. “There weren’t too many bands from that era who were as proficient; they couldn’t play Won’t Get Fooled Again from beginning to end, but we could. We’d often play the whole of The Who’s Live At Leeds note-perfect. I always thought we were more prog than new wave.”
Just as The Icicle Works never quite slotted into any comfortable genre, the same applies to McNabb the solo artist. Since winding up the band in 1990, the maverick adventurer has released more than a dozen studio albums that encompass pop, prog, psychedelia, folk and clamorous guitar rock, linked by a gift for a great melody. It’s an eclecticism mirrored in the associations he’d made over the decades, be it recording with members of the Lightning Seeds or Neil Young’s backing band Crazy Horse, collaborating with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck or Professor Brian Cox, or touring as part of The Waterboys or Ringo Starr’s band.
At 60 years of age, both strands of McNabb’s creative life have now come together. Utopian is the last in a trilogy of solo projects that began with 2017’s Star Smile Strong and continued into the following year’s Our Future In Space. “It sounds pretentious, doesn’t it?” says McNabb. “And it is pretentious. But as a movie buff I do love a good trilogy. The questioning introduction was Star Smile Strong, then Our Future In Space was the weird bit in the middle, that ends with a question mark ready to be answered. That’s what Utopian is.”