There are records that disappear so completely from the conversation that finding one feels less like browsing and more like archaeology — and Luxury Cohassan is exactly that kind of record.
Vicki Brown was one of the finest session singers Britain ever produced. She’d spent the late sixties and seventies breathing life into other people’s hits — backing Joe Cocker, lending her voice to film soundtracks, touring as part of the New Seekers machine — while her own career kept getting deferred. By 1979 she finally had a solo album, and nobody noticed, and that’s a quiet injustice worth sitting with.
What She Brought to the Room
The album was produced by Peter Yellowstone and recorded in London with a cast of seasoned professionals who knew exactly how to frame a voice like hers. Brown’s instrument was a rich, unhurried mezzo-soprano that could drop into warmth on a ballad or find an edge on something uptempo without sounding effortful. She didn’t oversell. In an era when overselling was practically contractual, that restraint is remarkable.
The arrangements lean into late-seventies sophistication — lush strings, understated electric piano, rhythm guitar that sits exactly where it needs to without announcing itself. There’s a Burt Bacharach influence running through the album’s DNA, that instinct for placing an unexpected chord exactly where the melody needs to breathe. The title track has a quality of expensive sadness to it that I keep returning to, the kind of song that sounds like it belongs in a film that never got made.
Her husband Joe Brown — guitarist, television personality, national treasure of the workingman’s variety — plays on the record. That detail matters. There’s an ease between musicians who share a life, and you can hear it in the way the guitars sit under her vocal on the quieter tracks, supportive without being precious about it.
A Record That Slipped Through
The late seventies were genuinely brutal for a certain kind of adult pop in Britain. Punk had redrawn the cultural map. The press had decided that careful craft was the enemy of vitality, which was always a false choice but proved to be a commercially decisive one. Luxury Cohassan arrived into that climate and sank without trace.
Vicki Brown kept working. She was constitutionally incapable of not working — session calls, tours, television dates. The record business’s indifference to her solo output never seemed to slow her down, which says something about either her character or her pragmatism, possibly both.
What you get here, if you track it down, is an album with no filler and no obvious centerpiece, just forty-odd minutes of adult pop played at a very high level by people who understood that craft is not the opposite of feeling.
Put it on late. It rewards the hour.