Tony Christie: Now's the Time! - review

Tony Christie considers this album to be "the real me", by which we infer that the Johnny Cash-style makeover he received on his credibility-enhancing last record, Made in Sheffield, was not the "real" him at all. Now's the Time! returns the 67-year-old crooner to his comfort zone of brassy lounge-pop and film soundtracks, and he sounds pleased to be there. And why not? His tenor, which forever hovers at the edge of quivering melodrama, was made for high-quality MOR like this. The best of a uniformly good bunch is 7 Hills, a deliciously sleazy country duet with Róisín Murphy, but also worth hearing are the jazzy Too Much of the Sun, which casts him as an old roué melancholically looking back at his life, and Get Christie, a spoof of the Get Carter theme with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker ("If a job needs doing and needs doing right, who ya gonna trust? Get Christie!").