Pop: You’d love Love and Money, too – if only you’d heard of them

How and when do you become ‘a fan’, exactly? You can usually spot pop stars who are losing touch with reality when they start talking about ‘the fans’ as some kind of independent entity, rather than just a load of people who like their songs. For the music obsessive, though, there’s a simple definition. You’re a fan if you buy someone’s new record without even thinking of listening to it first. Fandom accepts no caution. It only ever hopes for the best. It can take the disappointment of underachievement; it might even half-expect it. Fans have a right to criticise the objects of their affection; in fact, no one has more of a right. It’s a matter of ownership, of pride and, at its extreme, of mild derangement.

Sometimes, though, fandom creeps up on you unseen. As I write, I am waiting for my overburdened Estonian postman to deliver a newish album by the Scots group Love and Money, of whom almost no one has heard, I’m sad to say. In their original incarnation in the 1980s, Love and Money made little money but generated surprising quantities of love among people who like their pop literate, allusive, sinuously tuneful and unflashily well played. I found them because Gary Katz, formerly Steely Dan’s producer, oversaw their second album, 1988’s Strange Kind of Love, which contained a memorable minor hit in ‘Halleluiah Man’. The group was based around the slow, bluesy songs and characterful crooning of a long-faced glum called James Grant, who, after the group split up, went on to an even more low-key solo career. In the Nineties I kept an eye out for his records, rather than being wholly engaged, but everything changed with My Thrawn Glory (2000), which I believe to be one of the great lost albums of the past 20 years.