User:BrightNorthernSky/24 Years of Hunger

"24 Years of Hunger" (WEA [], 1991) was the first (and, to 2009, only) album release by the duo Eg White and Alice Temple.

It contained 11 tracks:

Rockets

In a cold way

Mystery man

And I have seen myself

So high, so low

New Year's eve

Indian

Doesn't mean that much to me

Crosstown

IOU

I wish

The album was an ultra-low-cost, almost art-house, project, relying upon simplicity, composition, and performance. Three tracks were recorded underneath a restaurant in All Saints' Road, London, one in a private house in Hampstead, and the remainder in White's own kitchen. The listener is left with a palpable feeling that the work is a labour of love, not an attempt at commercial success.

The album received widespread and fulsome critical acclaim. Radio airplay comprehensively outstripped sales, indicating that whilst the cognoscenti (including those in the radio business who had not yet succombed to commercial influences in their programing) were well behind the music, the record- and cd-buying public at large found the album less to their taste. Q magazine included "24 years of hunger" in their list of the best albums of the century, comparing it to Steely Dan and The Blue Nile".

White moved on to develop his songwriting career, and in the pre-release sleeve notes to his 2009 album "Adventure Man", noted that this later album's content might have started out as songs which did not meet the commercial standards he had set himself. That album included one track, "Pull me through", described in the pre-release sleeve notes as "a beautiful, harrowing ballad of survival written and sung nearly completely by Alice Temple... which was a way of 'closing the circle'".