The Archive
LAURIE STYVERS
Let Me Comfort You: The Hush Rarities
HIGH MOON
Innocent and unaffected: Laurie Styvers in London
8/10
Welcome vinyl addition to a slender, cruelly ignored catalogue of AM pop gems. By Wyndham Wallace
WHEN Laurie Styvers died in 1998, aged 48, obituaries apparently entirely failed to recall her bohemian musical incarnation almost three decades earlier.
No wonder, really. Recent years had been spent running an animal sanctuary in Texas, where she’d been born Laurette Stivers; her two albums, 1971’s Spilt Milk and 1973’s The Colorado Kid, were already long forgotten. Her one brush with success, her debut’s breezy, evergreen opener, “Beat The Reaper”, had also missed the charts even after British radio play, and despite Alan Freeman’s support, a follow-up 7”, The Colorado Kid’s playful, banjo-embellished “All American Long Haired Denimed Song-Writing Guitar Man”, joined her catalogue in obscurity.