The Mighty Xanthus: Hillfort by Starlight www.themighty xanthus.com XAN004
I guess I’ve known Cliff Dowding aka The Mighty Xanthus for the better part of 20 years now. He came along at just the right time for me when my annual project – providing the music at Blaker’s Park Community Picnic – was in a limbo caused by the pull-out of ‘Rock’s Kool’ a locally based project for young people in the Brighton area to learn to play and sing in a rock stylee the way they wanted to.
To fill the gap I contacted a number of local bands I’d begun following in the hope I’d get a few wanting to perform gratis at our event, thus preserving the quality the gig had built up over a number of years. I was floored by the positive response especially from a couple of my favourite bands aligned with the Real Music Club, namely Paradise9 and Sumerian Kyngs. I’d seen them perform on the same bill at the former ‘Ocean Rooms’ venue in Morley Street, Brighton and was thrilled when they both came back with such a positive attitude to the Picnic. I then contacted a number of other local bands on the then all-important MySpace social media platform and the positivity was further enhanced when so many replied - I was actually overwhelmed…
Cutting a long story short, I was also contacted as a result by a number of individuals that included Roy Weard, a well-established sound engineer and performer with The Legendary Wooden Lion and Cliff Dowding, The Mighty Xanthus. I feel proud of my small involvement in getting these two individuals together as, besides offering to engineer the Picnic at [very low] cost, very soon they had their own sound production company up-and-running and they have been collaborating ever since. Their generous input to the Picnic continued for several years until, sadly, a change of music policy on behalf of the event organisers meant sound engineering and the style of production we had been mounting was no longer required or welcomed.
However the story happily continues as not only has Cliff become an integral part of Sumerian Kyngs, he continues to perform as The Mighty Xanthus and to engineer many gigs in the area and beyond. I personally have been present at a fair number of these and have to say that my favourites have always been those at which Paradise9 and Sumerian Kyngs appear on the same bill. Both bands have had quite radical personnel changes over the intervening years but have always maintained a commitment to quality performance and composition while building a backbone of crowd-pleasing repertoires and a great rapport with their audiences.
Anyway, returning to the business in hand. I met The Mighty Xanthus doing supermarket shopping [yes – even he!] the other day and he informed me about this, his latest album ‘Hill Fort by Starlight’ and I jumped at the chance to purchase a copy not only because I wanted to hear it, but also in order to resume my trajectory as a gonzo journalist/reviewer, which has been in abeyance due to poor mental health. So here goes….
Well… I have to say I’m stunned by the huge step-up in quality of product when compared with previous Xanthus albums I’ve heard and reviewed. The standard is on par with the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre, The Chemical Brothers, Mike Oldfield, yeah!....even Tangerine Dream… no kidding. And I’d say Cliff’s use of danceable beats and sampling put the album firmly in the front-running for 21st-century space-rock electronica records. The idiot-dancing head-banging potential is immense. It’d be great to see a collaboration with an avant garde film maker to produce a multi-screen sonne et lumiere show that could tour or at least be taken to festivals by the end of the present decade. The visual imagery conjured by this music is THAT HOT!!!!
I’m not gonna go through the cd track-by-track – I’ll simply say the whole thing hangs together so beautifully I think you could happily call it a concept album. And I’d like to point up a couple of outstanding tracks, with a view to offering them up as ‘singles’ – tracks radio stations such as Radio Reverb or Brighton & Hove Community Radio might give airtime to, thus promoting the whole record.
The title track [in 2 parts – first and last on the cd] frame the composition nicely, while track 2 ‘Tell the World’ is like a freaked out ‘Two Tribes’ by FGTH and would make a great dance-floor anthem; while track 4 ‘Not in Service’ is heavily reminiscent of Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ phase. I think my favourite track is #10 ‘Tubular Dawn’, which could probably be edited down from nearly 9 to 4 or 5 minutes to make a great radio player. However, as I say, the whole album works wonderfully so it’s probably invidious to pick out personal favourites. So all I’ll say in conclusion is ‘Get it and I’m certain It’ll get You!’

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