THIRD TIME LUCKY

Well, it’s been a long while but there’s no denying it; it’s high time we had a look at how Stovepony’s rising sons The Lucky Strikes have been getting along. Having spent a long weekend in February at erstwhile Hawkwind, Groundhogs and Amon Duul II bassist Dave Anderson’s Foel Studio, laying down tracks for their third album, now titled Gabriel, Forgive My 22 Sins, things are now stepping up a gear. Like its predecessor, The Chronicles Of Solomon Quick, Gabriel… is a concept, based on the life of boxer Frankie Valentinez and the battle for his soul. As with the difference between their eponymous debut and Solomon…, the trajectory continues to route away from noisy garage-blues in the direction of wider-screen folk and country influences, no doubt helped by Big Jim Wilson’s flying fiddle as lead instrument. However, be assured that that killer blues punch is, largely thanks to Will Bray’s Bonhamesque drumming, still firmly at the album’s core. As befits the album’s theme, there’s a strong undercurrent of gospel, as could be found in the music of Dyaln and The Band, later in Green On Red (circa the masterful The Killer Inside Me) and The Gun Club, and later still in Arcade Fire.

The songs are all team efforts, lyrically split 50/50 between singer and guitarist Matt Boulter and guitarist and keyboard player Dave Giles. But so meticulously executed are they, so seamless the album’s flow, it’s impossible to tell who’s responsible for which, or to choose a favourite. But the opening ‘The Boxer, The Bribe And A Father’ displays a new complexity and confidence in the band’s writing, ‘Codeine’ stirs tense emotions, while the rambunctious ‘Easily, Easily Until It’s Done’ and the hymnal ‘Slowly The Night Fades’ (an Xmas single in waiting, if ever there was one) show that they’re already writing with the greater audience in mind. Indeed, prior to the album’s release in January 2011, the band will birth their debut (download-only) single ‘We Are Waves’ on 15 November. The last track on the album and, like ‘Paranoid’, something of an afterthought, ‘…Waves’ has, to use an aching cliché, hit written all over it. Of course, it probably won’t be a hit. And there’ll be no dodgy ‘Lucky Strikes For Xmas No 1’ Facebook groups, that’s for sure. But those who take the trouble to hear the song – perhaps encouraged by Boulter’s recent shows providing lap-steel for Simone Felice, or by one of the many shows the band has been playing in the run-up to the release – should feel that they’ve heard something rather special. The album will serve to confirm that.

Cast Adrift

A thousand apologies, gentle reader, for neglecting this blog. Well, I haven't really been neglecting it. I've been waiting for something to write about. Well, I thought I had something to write about, but it just didn't come to pass.

I thought musicians were crying out to release a record. Not so, apparently. I thought I'd found someone pretty damned perfect. I unexpectedly caught her set at one of the fortnightly Dog Fish Trombone nights that happens uptairs at a wine bar on The Strand. I'd gone down there to check out a rare headline show by Simon James Onions but was blown away by a young lass from the North-West who played just before, singing her own songs, mostly, and accompanying herself on mandolin. She had that wonderful kind of folky voice, lightly accented, slightly approximately pitched, with an otherworldly vagueness. She looked a lot like a young Anne Briggs and her take on New Order's 'Love Vigilantes' gave me goosebumps. I began hatching a plan there and then to put her record out. But despite an early smattering of contact via Myspace and email, the line's gone dead. I'm bummed, frankly. But if she don't wanna, she don't wanna. Perhaps boosted by my overtures, she's reckoning on holding out for bigger things, and who can blame her: they'll surely come. As for me, I can wait, but in the meantime, I'm going to jealously guard her identity. Suffice to say, if you manage to catch her, I know you'll dig her too.

So, with that out of the way, I can tell you that I was pleased last weekend to attend the launch of Stokey legends Monkey Island's new album Luxe et Redux at Karma Studios. I'd seen them described in listings as 'garage blues', which might be helpful to some, but is in fact very wide of the mark. They might have one foot in the garage and another in the art school, but something in between - I can't yet work out if it's the brain or the genitals - in a very sinister laboratory indeed. So yeah, it's pretty garagey, but at the same time it draws on the angular post-punk of Wire and the frantic crunchiness of old-skool thrash. The three of them certainly played their arses off but the set was all too short. However, they're gigging like blue-arsed flies lately, so plenty of other chances to catch them, not least at Biddle's on 3 April.

Finally, while I'm here, I might as well drop a plug for one of the two best bands in the UK right now, the fabulous Wolf People, who have a vinyl compilation of their earlier CDs out on Jagjaguwar. It's called Tidings and is, of course, superb. Well done them!

Keepin' Up With The Joneses

The healing powers of rock’n’roll are well documented. It’s a relief to report, as we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, that despite the establishment’s doing its level best to stop the kids getting down, not only is rock’n’roll in rude health, but that in the hands of certain practitioners, it's doing better than ever.

At What’s Cookin’ in Leytonstone on the Saturday night before Christmas, the Jim Jones Revue testified that they are one of the best rock’n’roll bands on Planet Earth, if not the best.

It seems not so long ago that their guitarist Rupert told me that he didn’t think What’s Cookin’ would be suitable venue for their incendiary highball of Sun-meets-SubPop shitstorming. I suppose he thought that it might be too much of a genteel country-roots sit-down supper club. Fairplay then to proprietor Ramblin’ Steve for convincing them otherwise. Now little more than a year later, Jones and Co are bigging up the club as one of their favourites, and returned to give it their second Xmas Party seal of approval.

If you’ve yet to experience the JJR, it’s fairly straightforward to suggest a meeting of minds between Jerry Lee and Little Richard, who went on to sire from their loins the conjoined twins, MC5 and New York Dolls who, on a visit to the UK, hopped into bed with Dr Feelgood. Then took a lot of bad drugs and recorded their debut album in a tin shack filled with scrap iron, just as a hurricane hit. You get the picture? You wish, you’re not even close!

One of the most amusing things about the JJR is their goatlike desire to stand on things. No burned-out Chevies to hand? How about a couple of the soon-to-be-condemned rickety tables upstairs at The Sheepwalk? In all honesty they’re about as sturdy as the very floor we’re standing on, which bounces a full eight inches under the gale force of Jones’s rough-as-shit-and-sandpaper bellow.

You’d think, if you’ve seen ‘em once, you’ve seen ‘em a dozen times. But proving there’s life in the old dog yet, the JJR just get better and better. Hard to imagine a better all-devouring earth-shattering rock’n’roll experience. So don’t even try.

The Bucket At The Thin End Of The Rope

I was very pleased/surprised/relieved/honoured (delete as applicable) to find the seventy-third edition of Bucketfull Of Brains magazine waiting for me on my doormat the other evening. In its thirty year history, it’s often barely struggled out – nominally a quarterly, I think there have been occasions where one issue a year has been a big ask. Yet in those thirty years, under various editorial leaderships, it’s never once dipped in quality.

Since its launch in 1979, it’s been a source of inspiration, a font of knowledge and a basket of light. I guess I first picked it up around ’86 on a vinyl-buying expedition to London, at a time when my hard-earned student grant was earmarked for various Australian imports. At that time BoB was the only publication featuring the likes of The Church, The Celibate Rifles, The Lime Spiders, The Hoodoo Gurus, etc. And as such, it was right up my street. But it also turned me on to such unheard delights as Davis, CA’s Thin White Rope, Hoboken, NJ’s Yo La Tengo and Walthamstow’s Bevis Frond.

As time’s worn on, I’ve only had limited access to each of these acts. Yo La Tengo have developed into a successful mainstream act by means of crossmatching plangent indie with psyched-out free jazz. Frond sits in his Walthamstow bunker, compiling brilliant compilation CDs for the Psychic Circle label, but very rarely gigging. And the Rope? They called it a day in ’92 after a string of brilliant desert-psych albums, including their live epitaph The One That Got Away, recorded at their final performance in the Belgian town of Ghent.

I was lucky enough to see Thin White Rope on the second day of my sojourn as a student in Birmingham in October ’88. It was in the backroom of The Hummingbird, there were only about thirty people there and the band came on at 11pm. And it was revelatory. Like Clarence White had joined Television and taken them off in a more Krautrock direction, yet still staying close to his country roots. Oh, halcyon days!

Unfortunately, I never got another chance to see them. I don’t know why. But by the time of their final tour, frontman Guy Kyser had decided that he’d rather play in bars with his girlfriend that front a brilliant desert psych band.

And, to cut a long story short, that is why Bucketfull Of Brains is so, so important: it knows what its readers want to read about and is the first to bring it to them. In every issue there are so many new musical relationships waiting to be formed, with bands you just won’t read about anywhere else, that – if they gig at all – you are only likely to see one or two times, in the weirdest of venues, on the rainiest of November nights, before they prematurely implode leaving you with the sweet, aching memory of it all. And isn’t that what being a fan is all about?

Hackney Central, Murder Mile

It seems like Lower Clapton Road has cleared up a bit these days. Certainly since those shagsacks Oasis came and made a video in the Round Chapel. Terminally uncool, the Burnage boys would've been oblivious that just up the road is another place of worship, Biddle's Bar.

Apparently a former hardware store, the place looks pretty much unchanged from those days. I guess. They've certainly still got the original signage. Quite a tiny little gaff, it's still big enough to have live music in the back bit. The first band I saw there were Hackney's veteran gypsy-punk renegades, Walking Wounded. Man! They tore the roof off the place that night. Thirty years, nine albums and still going strong.

The next act I saw there was Public Speech. Basically a project of Joe Eye Joe, onetime guitarist with Dalston's Pearl Jam soundalikes The Dolmen. Joe became something of a Hackney equivalent of Eminem - if a white boy can't rap in an integrated community like Dalston, then what's up with the world? The kid was good, he mad himself known and got a load of hits on his MySpace.

He couldn't leave his geetar down though, and Hey Presto! From beats and samples, Public Speech have become a full fledged band. And Saturday night's show indicates he's on track at last. One can't escape the pub-rockness of it all. who would want to? Joe's a tasty guitarist, from skanking Wilko-isms to far out Hendrixy flourishes. Other times they sound like a weird cross between The Specials and Hawkwind! And this is just a wee trio in a back-bar in Clapton!

But better still, those teenage observations still hold true. Truer! And Joe's lyrics are sharp as a tack. The posing DJs, the casual sexism of the Daily Star brigade, Hackney's own middle-class ghetto just up the road in Stokey. and now, the hilarious and self-explanatory 'Twitter'.

There's something really rich and vibrant about the Hackney scene. The salt and vinegar spirit of cynicism and protest is very much alive and well. A living, breathing heir to Ian Dury, Joe Eye Joe and Public Speech have taken something old and worn and made it new and very real indeed.

Of Pharmacy and Phree Speech

Well it's been a long time coming and now, after a brief false start last week, it finally arrived. Errgh? I'm talking about The Pharmacist, the debut full-length feature for Texture Films and the debut acting performance of Stovepony recording artist, Simon Onions. And you know? It's actually very good.

Briefly, the film revolves around the title character, played by Liana Gould, an embattled South-East London high-street pharmacist, surrounded by the needy men and petty bureaucracy. Tell me about it! I'm about as cheesed off with Boots, but I digress - that's for another time and another place.

Anyway, she discovers smalltime gangster Onions, hiding out and wounded and so begins a dangerous trail of dodgy dealings, drugs, dogs and.... Look, you'll just have to see it! Suffice to say it's great, Simon also provides the original music, and there's a bit of Bonnie Prince Billy in there too. Out officially next year.

While I'm here, I just want to flag up the fact that I was shocked, stunned and, frankly, not best pleased earlier today because some twat called me a hypocrite because of my perceived (by them) anti-free speech stance. For the record, I truly believe in the right to free speech, even for the most unsavoury. But there is such a thing as abuse of that right. And today, someone crossed that line. To them I say, you have the right speak as freely as you like, but don't also expect the right not to be called on it.

I've been negotiating something of a malaise of late. Might just be an Autumnal thing; you know, post-holiday, shortening days, the jarring realisation that you're closer to another year off your life. Also, another factor might be that I'm engaged in a crucial battle of wits with someone in a position of some power but I'm not at liberty to discuss it.

As it goes, a crucial indicator was the fact that I had a variety of options for Thursday night - the Midwich bash up at Ryan's, the Weli's new acoustic evening, 3rd Rok at Biddle's - and chose to do precisely none, instead staying in to watch the first instalment of Raymond Blanc's Restaurant show (rewarding, as it was, to witness two would-be retaurateurs, a mother and daughter couple, attempting to open a can of condensed milk with a carving knife and a rolling pin - now there's real talent!).

Anyway, the fact that I chose to stay in made me question whether I'd reached a point where I no longer went to gigs and that, effectively, that period of my life was at an end.

So it was good to resume DJing antics at What's Cookin' last night, in the company of those Jawbone boys, and somebody called the Monster Trucks, who allege themselves to be Southern Rock but in fact sound more like Toploader. No! I don't want you to think that I'm having a petty dig: they're all competent musicians who play well together. It's just that their name is a bit misleading. I was expecting baseball caps, big boots'n'beards, not Top Man trilbeys.

Delight of the night, though, had to be the opening boy/girl garage blues duo, Cowbell. They're from Stokey. Not particularly keen on the name, but the singer/guitarist had a great Guild semi and a powerful soulful voice to match. The lass on the drums - Wednesday - also had a very heavy right-foot which broke the bass pedal on the first song. I look forward to hearing more from this lot. But for now, here's a pic.....