Lester Square: Sin – Album Review

Lester Square sets his poetry to music and takes us on a journey from the crack in his ceiling to 1970’s New York, with Mama Cass and Pablo Picasso along for the ride.

Lester Square was the original guitarist in Adam and the Ants before co-founding The Monochrome Set with whom he recorded eleven studio albums. His guitar playing, a fusion of 50s clean riffs, alternative edge and playful melodies has influenced any number of guitarists from Johnny Marr to Nick McCarthy. But he remains on the edge of contemporary art, an eccentric in a long tradition of English songwriters who go their own way without artifice. And he is one of only a handful of people who look cool smoking a pipe.

Sin, his latest recording, sees his verse, he was shortlisted for 2026’s Sky Hawkins Poetry Prize, being recited by former Rolling Stone journalist Allan Platt, over musical soundscapes.

The music is generally playful, mixed low to give precedence to the words, only being turned up during the pauses or intro and outros. Platt’s intonation on the reciting’s often call to mind the eloquent and distinctive timbre of Vincent Price.

The songs are replete with clever little puns that are often easy to miss on first listening. On album opener A Brush With The Law, Pablo Picasso stands accused of killing art and, at the indictment the jury declare ‘aye’s (eyes) to the left, and the no’s (nose) to the right’. Things are quirkier on Digital Recording where the poet’s thumb is declared to be the spitting image of Mama Cass. And on Vacation we find the poet musing about holidays for the mind/soul, staying at the Holiday Yin or Holiday Yang.

Poems take a more serious tone on the musically baroque Questions: When the ice caps melted why didn’t you care? When the food ran out why didn’t you act?  Where were you when the world began to fall apart? Why am I asking you now? Because there is no ‘told you so’ on a dead planet. It’s a poetic plea that already may be too late. On Lemmings the argument is developed – in effect answering the questions of the climate disaster warning – where the human race is declared to be blind, deaf and dumb to the disaster enfolding around them whilst billionaires continue to rape the planet and its people for their own short-term gain.

Square is also good, as all poets are, at focusing on the everyday and turning it into art. The track Cracks opens with gentle, languid waves of chords as the poet observes the quotidian with acute observation; the crack on the ceiling, the gentle progress of a spider web. The poet makes the incidental important and declares that nothing will get past him next time, that maybe life’s tack can be changed by concentrating on the ephemeral. Whilst on Vinyl Moments the surface snap and crackle of surface noise become a ‘whispered diary of dust’.

The final track, A Checker Passed, is a memoir of the writers first visit to New York in 1979, to meet up with an old friend from Art College. It’s an odyssey through a New York that has passed into history. An odyssey that starts with a misstep – the writer, trying to find escape from the crowds waiting for taxis at the airport, steps onto a side street and into a cab with two guys on the backseat attempting to open a cash box with a stiletto. He’s driven around the city for an impromptu tour before, pulling up at Central Park, the inevitable happens and he is robbed of his cash and dumped on the street. Fortuitously, he isn’t far from the apartment building where he is to meet his friend. And in that 8^th floor apartment he also bumps into Andy Warhol and Barabra Guggenheim. He muses on the city where comedy meets tragedy, high and low life intermingle, where ‘disco meets Brasco’ and then shifts his attention to how New York is now, a parody of itself where ‘Trump stalks the UN with a baseball bat’.

These eleven compositions showcase Lester Square’s wry wit, eye for detail and concern for the world. In many ways he is a product of a lost world, that art school set who chose a different route than birth, school, work and death, and was a crucible for some of the most innovative bands of the 70s and 80s. Sin is the sound of an art school raconteur.

Sin by Lester Square

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You can find Lester Square on Bandcamp, Facebook, X and his art can be found here.

All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.