Mike Cooper - Life and Death in Paradise LP+CD

For so long in my mind, Mike Cooper was a dude in loud shirts that played long form improv pieces in art galleries. Little did I know that there’s a whole swathe of left-of-field song-based LPs in his early catalogue!!

Life and Death in Paradise was the last of these LPs, recorded in 1974. Recruiting the spiritual jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller and UK sax player Mike Osbourne, you don’t wanna mistake this for a ‘singer-songwriter’ LP.

Cooper dips into an almost winking acknowledgement of the bloated rock’n’roll excess of the era singing of rock’n’roll highways and the like in a winding, long form manner. Don’t forget that this all predates Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Heart by a couple of years (and probably sounds closer to Sally Can’t Dance or Coney Island Baby, or even a John Cale LP). A little bit schlocky and out there in the best kinda way!

Both the LP and CD reissue comes with a bonus CD of Cooper performing solo in Milan in 2018 which offers an intriguing insight into how he returned to song, adapted his lap steel playing and combined it with the tabletop-electronics of his free-improv years.–Mitch

“Beautiful, fucked-up mid-70s rock that’s really not like anything else. A mélange of mersh/avant/blues/folk/rock/jazz shiteroo, Life and Death in Paradise is a most splendid anomaly with hints of everyone from Gram Parsons to Michael Hurley to the Welfare State … Allow it into your head, and it will blossom like the strange mushroom it is.” – Byron Coley