Cover bands have a place, and it’s playing for drunk people to dance and sing along to. I’ve seen my share of alright cover bands, and a good amount that were truly awful. A few years back I played drums in a band that used to practice in a rehearsal studio where numerous cover bands bashed away. I never want to hear Hey Joe, Alright Now or Sweet Home Alabama again.
Some of them were technically good but no matter how they played the worst bands were the ones who took themselves ever so seriously. They didn’t realise that the only reason to be in a cover band is to have a laugh and make a few quid. Don’t act as if it's anything else.
Personally I’ve never been remotely interested in playing in a band that knocks out a few well known tunes for beer money. But I've played in bands that have thrown in a couple of covers to fill out the set. A country punk version of I Shot The Sheriff anyone? Sadly (or more to my relief) no recording of it exists. We also played a couple of songs by the band Firehose called Rocket Sled/Fuel Tank and Down With The Bass. Of course the crowd had never heard the songs so the audience thought they were our own. Infact I didn’t get around to hearing the original versions myself until our band split. I just drummed along.
But one out of three people in the band not knowing the song is better than four in five not knowing the songs like when I played in a band in my late teens and the guitarist thought we should learn a song by Swervedriver. We played it live a couple of times and I still don’t know what song it was.
I’ve recently came across a self-titled album on Tchantinler Records that came out last year by Voice Of The Seven Thunders. It’s a project by Bolton guitar virtuoso Rick Tomlinson who’s previously recorded under the name Voice Of The Seven Woods.
Where as Seven Woods is more an acoustic freak-folk affair that often has eastern styled leanings, Seven Woods is a much more a band record that rocks a whole lot more. There’s still acoustic guitar in there but it’s hammering out a rhythm underneath the electric guitar as it weaves out twisted psychedelic solos that reminds me of the Jimi Hendrix song Free Spirit.
For years I wasn’t sure if Free Spirit even was a Jimi Hendrix song. I got it on a bootleg called Fire that had some Live recordings of classic songs like Voodoo Child (Slight Return) and Purple Haze along with a couple of instrumental songs.
The reason why I’ve never been sure if the instrumental songs were played by the Jimi Hendrix Experience is that I’d bought another Hendrix bootleg from the same shop in Stratford that had a few songs that certainly weren’t Hendrix. Maybe Hendrix played in the backing band of the version of Bessie Mae but it certainly isn’t him singing. That CD also had some live recordings including a storming eight minute version of Red House and a song called Morrison’s Lament which features Jim Morrison drunkenly shouting rubbish over a laboured jam. Free Spirit was given an official release in 1998 on a compilation of Jimi Hendrix rarities.
Back to Voice Of Seven Thunders, it's an album well worth checking out and I look forward to whatever voices of seven Rick Tomlinson does next.
Voice Of Seven Thunders: The Burning Mountain mp3 here
It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week. Often I fall into a state of stagnant
purgatory when it comes around to Wednesday, the previous weekends exploits are way behind but the forthcoming weekend is not yet in grabbing distance.
It’s easy to feel like you’re going through the motions in a hypnotic monotonous state. And the repetitive space-drone-rock of San Francisco band Wooden Shjips are perfect to reflect that state of mind.
Most of the time they stick to the same formula, the rhythm section keeps it locked in tight to a simple driving groove, no drum fills, no bass scale runs. The Moog keyboard forms a bed underneath, a verse of echo dek vocals followed by the guitar going off on one with an overdrive delay pedal solo.
It may sound like they only have one song but what a great song it is.
The music of the Scottish duo Arab Strap, consisting of Vocalist Adrian Moffat and
multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton passed me by during their ten year recording career.
I wish I was into them at the time, and looked forward to their latest realises and checked out their tour dates in the listing sections of the NME but in the mid-nineties I guess I wasn’t ready for their restrained, brooding melancholy music. I was listening to generally more upbeat stuff like with distorted guitars like Super Furry Animals, Oasis, Sonic Youth and The Who. But of course the records are still there to be heard, so over the last year or so I’ve been making my way through Arab Strap’s back catalogue. If you’re unfamiliar with their stuff and don’t know where to begin then I would suggest starting with the album The Red Thread and work from there. But I wouldn’t recommend that you put it on when getting ready for a Saturday night out.
Ten years ago the Denton Texas three piece band Lift to Experience released their debut double album called ‘The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads.’ A concept album about the end of the world where Texas is the promised land set against a swirling psychedelic wall of sound.. It could even be called Christian-space-rock. If you read the songs titles after one another they read like chapters from the scripture.
Disk One titled Texas reads:
Just as Was Told, Down Came the Angels, Falling from Cloud 9, With Crippled Wings. Waiting to Hit, The Ground So Soft.
Disc Two titled Jerusalem reads:
These Are the Days, When We Shall Touch, Down with the Prophets, To Guard and to Guide You, Into the Storm.
But as the bands singer/guitarist and songwriter Josh T Pearson mentioned in an interview when asked about the records Christian leanings he noted that you can admire Michelangelo’s David as a great piece of art without having to believe in angels. I knew on the second listen that it would be an album I will never tire of.
If they sounded apocalyptic on record then they were even more so live. The first time I saw them was at The Garage in Highbury supporting Cat Power. I’d never heard and still haven’t heard a band play so loud. After they left the stage in a barrage of feedback Cat Power came on with an acoustic guitar and quietly strummed and mumbled while hiding behind her hair. I didn’t stay for much longer and left with my ears buzzing. To say that the main act was blown away by the support act is a massive understatement.
Lift To Experience soon split up and Pearson retreated to deepest darkest Texas. A couple of years later I saw him play a spellbinding solo acoustic gig above a pub next to Spitalfields Market. He played a bunch of new songs under the heading Angels Vs Devils. Over the years these songs would mutate to various degrees of success and have been documented in bootlegs available to buy at shows, such as Live In Paris, and one that I own called To Hull And Back (yes it’s a live album from the oh so great Yorkshire city of Hull). The only proper release was a spooky cover of the Hank Williams song ‘I’m So Lonesome I could Cry’ on a split single with The Dirty Three.
But next month is when Josh T Pearson finally puts out his debut solo album on Mute Records called Last of the Country Gentlemen.
Its not like the wall of sound that Lift To Experience played, its not like the Angels Vs Devil songs. It’s a beautiful, sparse, haunting, personal record. listening to it all the way through took something out of me, but with songs like ‘Woman When I’ve Raised Hell’ and ‘Sorry With A Song’ its well worth it.
I just hope the next record doesn’t take so long.
Elbow's new album ‘Build A Rocket Boys!’ is released on March 7th. I first got into Elbow when their second album and in my opinion their best ‘Cast of Thousands’ had been out about a year. I was aware of them before and what I ’d heard I quite liked, but I was put off by their name. I mean who would name their band after an awkward sounding body part. I don’t know how they all agreed on it. It’s so bad. But then again they were originally called Soft. That’s even worse.
Guy Garvey from Elbow has often stated that their music is influenced by the eighties band Talk Talk. Talk Talk made some great records but it’s a crap name. Not so much at the time but if you type their name into a search engine now you get a load of offers on a phone and broadband package. Until their fourth album The National used to have a Google search problem. You had to trawl through National Express, National Geographic, National Rail, National enquirer... it went on. But not as bad as any band with the word fuck in their name.
I'm over my band name prejudice's, apart from the band !!!.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been trawling through a boxset of the HBO series Deadwood (yes that’s the bloke out of Lovejoy don’t you know). At the back end of last year I spent a good solid month on the Xbox playing Red Dead Redemption (yes that's righ,t it's like Grand Theft Auto with horses). This month I hope to see the Cohen brothers remake of the film True Grit. I guess I’m going through a wild west phase.
But you got to love a western, and the music is always great (well apart from that Jon Bon Jovi song in Young Guns). My favourite film soundtrack has to be the one that Neil Young did for the Jim Jarmusch western Dead Man. Young's trusty black Gibson guitar crackles away menacingly throughout.
Staying on the western theme, I've also been getting into the self-titled debut album from the Italian band Guano Padano. It’s a record heavily influenced by their fellow countryman Ennio Morricone spaghetti western film scores, mixed in with Tex-Mex Americana and some surf Guitar.
So to get this off the ground I need an opener. Every album needs a great opener. It’s one of the rules of Rock n’ Roll. Start with something to grab the attention. Something to make the listener want to stick with the record. Some bands try to be smart and put one of their weaker songs at the beginning of a record. Maybe its because they think they’re far too cool to do the obvious thing of starting with one of the better songs. Maybe it’s because they think that every song on the album is a masterpiece.
A good proportion of albums stick to the rules and start with the best songs. Then usually it will trail off into filler.
Hear are some great opening tracks from great albums that don’t trail off:
There’s not a weak track on Bob Dylan’s Bring It All Back Home and no better way to kick it off than Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Nothing screams ‘Pay attention to me now!’ like Iggy And The Stooges Search And Destroy when you put on Raw Power.
My Bloody Valentine’s song Only Shallow from Loveless set’s the tone for the record perfectly.
Safe From Harm from the album Blue Lines by Massive Attack. What a bass line.
Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space eases you into Spiritualized album of the same name. On occasions I’ve skipped though the last track that’s seventeen minutes long but it’s a near to perfect record as you can get.
