INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
I 7 MARCH 1996
Baby Bird: The Happiest Man Alive
(Baby Bird, CD/LP).

The fourth installment in the five albums-in-nine-months Baby Bird cycle is the most uneven so far. But given that the 400 songs in Mr Bird’s sensa­tional Sheffield song library were all down on tape before the first selection saw the light of day, conventional notions of chronological progression or decline do not really apply.

What does matter is that barbed and beautific Bird-man Steven Jones is one of the few lyricists at work in Britain today with the power to make you stop and rewind a tape to check that you really heard what you thought you did. Newcomers to Bird-land should proceed directly to the hilarious Married, the very scary Beautiful Disease or the truly twisted Plane Crash Xmas, and make the acquaintance of a songwriter who blends the melodic sensibility of Lionel Richie with the acid wit of Dorothy Parker. And sometimes even vice-versa.
BEN THOMPSON