The Pineapple Thief

Retracing Our Steps (2007–2014) KSCOPE

Exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, trawl through the band’s formative years

In some cultures, seven-year cycles can mark the arc of spiritual growth. The human body replaces many of its cells over a period of seven years, including skin, bone and liver. And of course there’s the seven-year itch – that veritable sword of Damocles dangling above the marital bed. In truth, that all sounds a little more welcome than schlepping back and forth on your bicycle from your post at the Spatial Systems department for South Somerset District Council to a family home and newly born twins, all the while dreaming of a world of music, a place to write and record songs without the real world getting in the way.

This collection might well have been called Bruce Soord’s Dream, because it charts the band’s uneasy arc from a standing start to 2015 and the creative and commercial freedom that music had finally afforded Soord: the ability to ditch his high-vis jacket and commute, and instead support his family by doing the thing he loved. And it’s all retold lovingly in CR’s Polly Glass’s excellent essay that accompanies this seven-CD set, along with a series of pub-gig photos that show a band more on its uppers than on the up. It’s stark and unsettling, offset only by the fact the story has a happy ending. But what a slog it’s been. Case in point: I first interviewed Soord for the excellent Someone Here Is Missing in 2010, with its unsettling Storm Thorgerson artwork, and assumed – quite wrongly – that this was his prime focus, although that was still some five years off.

Soord, a production wizz long before he mastered the fine art of performing live, as this collection attests, has, along with Steve Kitch, revisited What We Have Sown, Tightly Unwound, The Dawn Raids, the aforementioned Someone Here Is Missing, All The Wars and Magnolia, plus the spare The Acoustic Versions disc, and given them a lustre and depth, not to mention the ubiquitous Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound, previously missing on the originals. It’s a labour of love as well as unearthing some rare and previously unreleased gems from those initial bedroom sessions.