The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant." George Orwell on England. Had he heard The Greatest Living Englishman, Orwell might have added that British pop is darker, the songs are livelier, the bass is brighter and the amplifiers more reverberant.

Martin Newell came out of the mid-'70s London punk scene, but even then, he was a nationalist. His band London S.S. were forerunners of the pioneering punks the Damned, among others. But Newell quit music to write poetry. Lured back by the prospect of a solo album, Newell hooked up with Andy Partridge. The result blends latter-day XTC, mid-'60s Beatles and a healthy dose of the Kinks' decline-of-the-empire blues. "Good Bye Dreaming Fields" leads off with a guitar that sounds like XTC's "Towers of London." The lyrics invoke the album's overall mood: "I'm a ghost in my hometown/Since they knocked that dance hall down."

"Before the Hurricane" features pizzicato and sweeping strings by Partridge that transport the listener back to an unchanged world. Newell's bitter line "There's a cardboard box for everything/But this one holds a man" appears in "We'll Build a House" – the chorus reinforced by a frighteningly beautiful time delay that returns each word three or four times. In "The Jangling Man" the indictment is even more plain: "So wander dimly through the past/Of the England that you knew/These dispossessed and homeless children/They all belong to you."

This album's cover reads Martin Newell featuring the new improved Andy Partridge. Captain Sensible also drops in to solo, and XTC's Dave Gregory is billed as Pop Mastermind. Between tracks is a series of sound bites created by Lol Elliott; my favorite is the Spinal Tapish reflections on 1968: "Pressure got too much for Dave, and then Steve dies...."

In the pantheon of rock artifacts, The Greatest Living Englishman ranks with the Flamin Groovies' Shake Some Action.

The Greatest Living Englishman is available by calling Pipeline Records at (516) 681-2125. (RS 689)

ANDY LYMAN