Shoot! First time an artist has provided Blabber’n’smoke with the opening for a live review but here’s Cam Penner on Facebook just before he hit the stage…
“I wonder what people think when they see Jon and myself walk up on stage. Especially if they have never seen us before. The Bear. Pacing back and forth, machines whirling, ghosts, crashing, pedals creaking, the beat, falsetto, eyes closed. The Conjurer. Feet hovering over lights, notes rising, crooked fingers pulling wire, gripping, colours, coaxing, luring.”
Yip, that about sums it up. Penner’s a large guy and he does wander the stage picking up this and that, banging and strumming, in his element. And Wood does conjure as he deftly coaxes sounds from his set up, tape loops and sound effects which surround the pair and envelop the music. Ah, the music. There’s mystery and menace, love and humility, savage blues and tender romances, sounds one can imagine primitive man heard, allied with tribal ritual and chain gang hollers, delta moans and sylvan murmurs. All summoned up by these two Canadians armed with guitars, a drum kit and tape loops.
The scene was set from the start as Penner did indeed wander the stage before muttering “Come on people” into the mic and then looping it into a chant as the pair eased into Gather Round from their latest album, At War With Reason, the first of four songs from the disc played without interruption. With the looped chant sounding like a Curtis Mayfield refrain the song was hypnotic as Penner urged us to join together to combat the current mayhem before letting loose some on stage mayhem as East Side’s thunderous kick drum and scintillating guitar shards from Wood accurately summed up a state of urban warfare. East Side petered out with a burble of delicate keyboard and eased into the crepuscular Poor You which gradually built in intensity before erupting into a savage rendition of Lights On (High School Musical), Penner’s savage riposte to the spate of school shootings which has plagued America. With guttural guitar from Wood, Penner inhabited the world of rap here, the song briskly executed and ending with him declaring, “For the kids.”
It was a stunning opening to the night’s set, a suite of songs perfectly delivered with a fierce honesty. Taking time out to tell the audience of his love for Glasgow (and he’s sincere in this), he went on to remind us of his singer songwriter roots without all the sonic trappings on Thirteen before launching into House of Liars, his song which featured in the BBC drama Stonemouth. Ghost Car, a rain slicked road song, and Cool Cool Nights (with Wood on lap steel) were another pair of what might be called conventional songs amidst the night’s primal screams, both outstanding. But it was soon enough that Penner and Wood dived into the swamp with an utterly brutal and eviscerating blend of Can’t Afford The Blues and Honey as the pair of them whipped their guitars into submission, blazing away for an eternity (or at least seven minutes). The night was ending and Penner visited his more tender side for an affecting delivery of Over & Over but the applause encouraged the pair to stay on stage for another visceral blues take on Memphis with his stentorian wailing somewhat akin to Howling Wolf. The skewed, almost Beefheart like, To Build a Fire followed bringing this awesome night to an end.
Blabber’n’Smoke has seen this duo several times and will testify that their shows are a communion of souls as Penner, a humble and lovely man, and Wood, a musical maestro, take their audience on a trip into the vitals of roots music leaving no one unmoved. With all the sound effects and loops conjured up on the night each show is unique and as good as their albums are it would be mighty gratifying if one day they captured a show on disc in the hope that they also capture some of the magic and mystery they conjure up on stage.
What’s inside the mind of the modern man? Well, according to Benjamin Folke Thomas, this fellow is a bit of a dreamer, somewhat insecure in his love life (and even prone to occasional fantasies) but deep down he’s a good guy who worries about the environment and rails against injustice. Importantly he also has a sense of humour, witness the back cover art which has Folke Thomas in a space suit patiently queuing with his shopping in a mini mart – an outsider tasked with mundane tasks.
Recorded in his native Sweden, Modern Man bobs and weaves its way through several styles- Neil Young like guitar tourneys, jangly pop rock, and introspective folk all raise their heads here- with Thomas’ winning voice and his well crafted words the glue which binds the album together. He says of the disc that he “Wanted to get away from just writing about myself and my broken heart… or at least to do it by taking the piss out of myself with sardonic humour.” There is a touch of biography in some of the songs with One Day a poignant number where he recalls his early troubadouring and dreams whimsically of the day he becomes a star. Stuff of Dreams is another night time fantasy with Thomas, an avid pool player, dreaming of meeting Paul Newman in his Fast Eddie Felson persona to play a few breaks and “chew the shit.” Here Thomas’ impish humour is apparent in the heavenly refrain which floats out throughout the song in contrast to Thomas who sings it as if he were Johnny Cash. There’s more oohs and aahs backing the opening song Tasteless and Complacent, a fine jangled number which introduces Thomas’ querying of the human condition (which reappears throughout the album) as he employs a somewhat misanthropic protagonist who has a glimpse of salvation if he can only find some folk who like him. Likewise, Some People has guitar jangles and a driving beat although here Thomas sounds almost like Gene Clark at times as he casts around various belief systems trying to make sense of them.
One More Chance is an affecting portrait of a man pleading for, yes, One More Chance, as his partner packs her bag and sets her ring on his table as she goes off to seek someone with a “better insurance policy.” As a break up song it works magnificently although one can’t help but suspect that it’s written and sung somewhat tongue in cheek. More unnerving is the title song which starts off describing a stalker who follows his prey before zooming out allowing the listener to acknowledge that this man could be any one the male population. The song is set to slow burning electric guitar over a sludge like rhythm, eventually picking up pace before climaxing in a frantic burst of noise, the irony felt in every note. There is some sweet revenge in the murder ballad, Lily Like A Gunslinger, where an abused woman shoots her husband after 14 years of abuse, the words as hard-boiled and lean as in a Jim Thompson story.
Finally, there’s the magnificent guitar epic, Dead Horizon, which has Thomas and his band (The Swedish Folk Mafia) invade Neil Young and Crazy Horse territory as they growl and wail for seven minutes. Thomas points his finger towards populist movements with his words here reminding one of the late Phil Ochs.
With Modern Man, Benjamin Folke Thomas has delivered a mature album which is both personal and significant as he investigates the modern malaise. It’s a grand listen with some humour involved but it’s also deadly serious.
The debut album from Glasgow’s The Rulers of The Root was an excellent disc which saw the band roaming around territory populated by the likes of Ian Dury, Captain Beefheart and Nick Cave although they played as if they were a bunch of Martians who had learned their licks via satellite transmission in between watching reruns of Taggart. Some songs were couched in a surreal simulacrum of Americana music with odd snippets of Glaswegiana thrown in, the Broomielaw and The Scotia Bar featuring in Rose of Jericho for example. The follow up album, This Sugar Tit Life, presses on in this direction although it’s a much more focussed album with the majority of the songs rooted in bluesy rock or neon lit late night wierdness with some sixties garage band snottiness thrown in for good measure.
Patrick Gillies, their gravel throated singer and late blooming songwriter, remains at the helm of the ship. His flights of fancy, lyrical conundrums and plain old absurdity command attention throughout while as a singer he is much more in command here – growling, lascivious, lashing the words for all they are worth. Meanwhile his colleague, guitarist John Palmer, paints the songs with splashes of colour with corkscrewed blues, growling rock’n’roll and reverbed twang guitar dashing throughout the album while the rhythm section of Chris Quinn and Stewart Moffat ably adapt to the myriad of forms the songs take on.
At their simplest the band come across as an excellent tight knit combo as on the boogie of Cain Made This Town which belts along as if it just skipped out of Memphis while the title song is a hard stomping blues number with Gillies sounding like Beefheart roaring out on Hard Working Man from the movie Blue Collar. Give The Dog a Bone is a Bo Diddley buzz cut of a song with the guitars slashing and burning across a ferocious beat while Yoker Tam is powered by a taut and driving bass and drums which are almost Krautrock in their precision with a glistening guitar sheen running throughout it.
However, it’s when Gillies lets fly his imagination when the band really take off. Govanhill Lullaby kicks off with a Morricone like spaghetti western sweep as he gathers up the media painted detritus of this much-maligned neighbourhood and spews it out in a Technicolor dream with regular keyboard player Alan French adding some excellent garage band Farfisa stabs. Meanwhile The Lubyanka Blues is an Aesop fable from hell with the band coming across like The Band fronted by Screaming Jay Hawkins. On several of the songs the band slow down and slither through a twilight zone as if they were in a David Lynch soundtrack. The Gap creeps along with a louche touch of evil and Night of the Hunter has some Dr. John voodoo hoodoo about it but the best effort here is the magnificent Face of an Angel. Think of the magnificently stained noirish quality of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and transport it to Glasgow and you are halfway there. Here Gillies inhabits perfectly a loathsome character who is perversely attractive, narcissistic to the extreme and who, “Feeds amphetamine to his pigeons/yes he’s guilty of that deed/but the doos are his religion and they seem to like their seed.” Just awesome.
The album is released today with a launch gig at Glasgow’s Glad Cafe. Tickets here.
JP Harris tore into town for a night of hard-core country and honky tonk which just about blew the socks off of everyone at the show and dispelled all doubts about the current state of American roots music. Harris, originally from Alabama, is the real deal with a hobo background and who earns his crust by carpentry when he’s not riding the rails with his band. with a cracking new album, Sometimes Dogs Bark at Nothing, under his belt, and sporting one of the finest beards in captivity played a powerful and joyous show full of riveting lyrics and twangtastic guitar to an enthusiastic crowd in the bowels of Nice N Sleazy.
Honky tonk was on his mind as the band swung into Two For The Road with guitarist Justin Mahoney twanging away as pedal steel player Thomas Bryan Eaton deftly laid out his delicious curling licks. There was pure dirt stained country on Badly Bent while I Only Drink Alone, from the new album, was a fantastic nod to the tear stained waltzes so beloved of bygone Nashville artists such as Ray Price but Harris showed that he can shine on poppier material such as the sixties folk sound of Lady in The Spotlight. It’s hard however to imagine any band right now who can hammer through songs such as JP’s Florida Blues #1 and Gear Jammin’ Daddy with such ferocious energy. The latter song received the most enthusiastic response of the night and with Eaton fairly soaring away on pedal steel it was well deserved. With the songs all packing a punch in less than four minutes each Harris and his band roared through the set with commentary kept to a minimum (although he did take a poke at Trump at one point). An encore of Jerry Reed’s Freeborn Man topped the night as they ran through all the red lights with the brakes off, trucking the highway and riding the rails with a fury and, it has to be said, a great deal of gritty country style. As we said earlier, JP Harris is the real deal.
The evening opened with an inspired set from an impromptu conglomeration, a super group of sorts featuring local musicians from the Holy Smokes recording roster calling themselves Trusty Buck’s Lone Star Revue. A raggle taggle ensemble (composed of members of The Hoojamamas, Harry and the Hendersons, Awkward Family Portraits and Tom McGuire & The Brassholes – do check them all out), they played a short set which ranged from skiffle like numbers to Ronnie Lane inspired rambles. There was a wonderful song about flying to Peru which floated on some inspired lap steel guitar while there was a nod to local hero Les Johnson & Me (who was billed to appear but sadly didn’t) as they covered one of his songs. They finished with a fine version of The Stones’ Sweet Virginia with the audience singing along.
Squeezed in between Trusty Buck and JP Harris, Miss Tess (who was handling bass guitar duties with the Tough Choices) ran through a short set accompanied by Thomas Bryan Eaton on guitar. An established artist in her own right Miss Tess set the scene well for JP as she had a fine twangy guitar presence along with a finely hewed sense of neon lit sadness as in her opening number Going Downtown. On Moonshiner, with JP’s rhythm section sitting in, she romped through a rambunctious salute to old time rebels with some fine country picking from Eaton.
It can be a daunting task trying to compile a definitive discography of Will Oldham, the Kentucky born Americana polymorph who records as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Palace Brothers, Palace and several other monikers. He’s an inveterate collaborator and has a host of singles and EPs to wade through along with his now lengthy album back catalogue. As far as we can ascertain he has only recorded under his own name on 1997’s Joya so this new release, reworkings of old songs, might be seen as a recap of his quarter century of recording were it not so brief. The true recap is actually in the form of a book of the same name which gathers the lyrics of over 200 songs together with comments from Oldham on their origins and meanings. However, this aural peek into his past is a delightful collection.
Stripped back to just Oldham and his guitar the album is an austere listen with his voice ringing out throughout proving that he has grown into a supremely tender and emotive singer. Choosing just ten songs from his past he sounds at times as he did on the early Palace Brothers albums without the faux patina which offered those albums an air of mystery. This is much more bedsit folk orientated as if early Leonard Cohen were the benchmark (with the title perhaps a nod to Cohen’s album, Songs of Love and Hate). With a fine balance between his better known songs such as I See A Darkness (famously recorded by Johnny Cash) and New Partner along with deeper cuts Oldham is tender, dark and erotic in turn (listen to Big Friday for example).
He veers from his task of revisiting his songs on two occasions. There’s an acappela rendition of Richard and Linda Thompson’s Strange Affair with an extra verse (presumably by Oldham) added. Oldham inhabits the remorse and melancholia of the song excellently sounding as if he were being recorded in the field in some god forsaken past time. The album closes with what purports to be an unreleased 1997 recording, Party With Marty (Abstract Blues) with Oldham definitely sounding younger as he strums his way through a lo-fi haze which sounds as if Jeffrey Lewis was singing a blissed out surfer’s sex fantasy. It’s an odd conclusion to the album but then again it’s Will Oldham isn’t it.
A founding member of Philadelphia rockers Go To Blazes, Tom Heyman built up a solid reputation as a sideman after the band broke up in 1997. Moving to San Francisco, his guitar and pedal steel skills graced albums and tours by the likes of Chuck Prophet, The Court and Spark, Russ Tolman, John Doe and Alejandro Escovedo. In between this extensive touring Heyman also dipped his toes into a solo career releasing two well received albums in 2000 and 2005 but it wasn’t until the release of a third album, That Cool Blue Feeling, in 2014 that he recommenced his solo career in earnest hanging up his guitar slinger for hire sign for the time being. His current release, Show Business, Baby, is an album which he says is, “a straight-up love letter/homage to my late ’70s/early ’80s pub rock heroes Rockpile, Mink Deville, The Leroi Brothers and all of their many offshoots.”
Heyman this week embarks on a lengthy tour of Europe and the UK in the company of Dan Stuart, the pair of them playing a gruelling 33 shows over 33 days in nine countries but he was kind enough to take some time out on the eve of flying to Italy to speak to Blabber’n’Smoke. And mighty entertaining it was too as he spoke about his love of records and how Dan Stuart is bad luck for any liberal minded folk heading into an election among other things.
Hi Tom, how are you?
I’m good, just sitting here in my kitchen in San Francisco where it’s 70 degrees out, just getting my stuff together for the tour, the usual pre tour anxiety making sure I’ve got the right amount of picks and strings and stuff, covering my bar shifts and stuff.
The calm before the storm perhaps as it looks as if you and Dan are going to be barnstorming through Europe for the next month.
Yeah, it looks pretty brutal. I didn’t realise until we put up the poster that there’s literally not one day off but Dan and I have done this a bunch now so we know each other pretty well and we should be able to tackle it. The worst thing was I had to learn to drive a manual car for the tour and there was no end of ribbing from Dan for that. I had to explain to him that my dad’s from Brooklyn and he didn’t have a car until he was 30 so driving wasn’t a thing for us until we moved to the suburbs and there everyone just drove an automatic, whereas Dan’s from the west where they have more manual transmissions, so I had to take some lessons before we go.
So it’s like 33 dates in nine countries, you’ll be exhausted by the time you get to Scotland towards the end of the tour.
Well you could say ten countries because I consider Scotland to be a separate country from Britain, I mean you guys didn’t vote for Brexit, did you? But we’ll be at the top of our game by then, we’ll be really tight in our show business thing. The first night of the tour is always the trickiest so in this case Rome gets to see the warts and all thing, how the sausage is made but by the time we get to you it will be seamless.
So essentially it’s a two man show, you and Dan. What will you be playing for us?
We’re going to be joined by Sid Griffin on several of the shows, some in the UK and a couple in Europe and that will be fun but for the most part it’s Dan and me. I’ve been working up a bunch of stuff, songs from my new record which is sort of like a full on rock record but I wrote the songs like they were folk songs at first so five or six of them I can do solo – instead of sounding like Rockpile they sound like Leadbelly. And I’ve been trying to learn a bunch of other interesting things so I don’t bore Dan on the tour and he won’t be seeing the same show from me every night, I’ll be throwing something different or new in each night. I could maybe pick a set list of 10 or 12 songs that work and play them every night and the audience would be seeing it for the first time but Dan would be seeing the same show from me night after night so my primary objective, aside from putting on a good show, is to amuse Dan in some way.
And after your set you’ll be playing guitar with Dan.
Yes, I add the colour. And again, Dan’s catalogue is pretty deep and I’ve played a lot of his stuff with him before so we probably won’t be the same every night. We’ll probably take requests as some folk will want to hear his solo stuff while others will want a Green on Red song and then he’ll sometimes throw me a curveball. But if you play with someone long enough you can kind of anticipate things a little bit and its fun as well, kind of being kept on my toes. It makes it kind of exciting. For me it’s like the best of both worlds. I started out as a guitar player and I just really thought of myself that way for a long time so with Dan I get to do two things, singing my own songs and then playing guitar with Dan.
Will you playing any of your older stuff.
There’s one Go To Blazes song that I usually play called Bloody Sam which I wrote about Sam Peckinpah. It’s a significant song for me because it was the first one I wrote which worked well and it seemed to really resonate with people. I mean I didn’t sing it originally, I wrote it and played guitar but back then we had this extraordinarily great singer, Edward Warren, in the band so I didn’t see any reason in singing. But I still like the song and it kind of weirdly dovetails with one of Dan’s songs, The Day William Holden Died and of course one of Holden’s last great performances was in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. But then I’ve got a bunch of new songs I’ve written so there’ll be a couple which I’ll try to put in every night. It’s a way of getting the tyres on them, seeing how people react. I’ve probably got about a record and a half of songs ready but every time I make a record it seems like an even more futile gesture in a world of a diminishing music industry so I figure I’ll try to make two more full-length records and then reassess whether doing them is still viable.
That seems to dovetail with Dan Stuart’s declaration that his latest album is going to be his last, at least in the sense that most folk would call an album.
That’s what he’s saying and I think he’s serious about that but who knows? It’s tough in these days of streaming music, folk just making playlists.
I take it you’re a fan of a good old-fashioned record album?
I can’t seem to let go of that. When I think of music I don’t think of just a song but I go back to the way I formatively listened to music which was on vinyl, side A and side B. That sense of getting past that fourth song to get to the fifth because that’s really good and then the third one on the second side is brilliant. It would take what, 30, 35 minutes to listen to a record and I would listen to it the way people read a book, I would just disappear into it. I really like blues and I’ve got the original Stax recording of Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign and I love that record, it just works so well. Even collections of songs such as The Beatles’ Red and Blue albums, they work as albums to me, they’re really curated. Look at Neil Young’s Decades, it really works. So I still think of stuff that way, of grouping songs together, thinking we need an uptempo song here and then another in maybe a different key before we get to the ballad, that sort of thing.
It seems so much better than streaming songs, there was the cover art, the liner notes
Absolutely and I come from an age when the liner notes were really good, there was like a personality in the best ones. I remember a Thin White Rope record and I opened it up and inside there was a heavy coloured piece of paper with a single spaced typed message from the band talking about a tour they did of Russia. They toured Russia by train and, by the way, this was way before Billy Joel went to Russia, and it seemed like this insane misadventure and it just made me feel connected to the band and it made me listen to the record really differently. That experience of holding a record is just so good. I was always really disappointed when the liner notes weren’t there, I mean country records didn’t tell you who played on the disc but then you had the LA records from the seventies like Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy. There’s all the lyrics on one side of the sheet and on the flip side there’s a list of who played what, like Leeland Sklar, Russ Kunkel and Waddy Watchell and then there’s Jackson Browne on backing vocals and it’s like, WOW! That was exciting to me.
Regarding your own records there was quite a gap between Deliver Me and That Cool Blue Feeling.
Yeah, eight years really, how to explain that? Well I was really deep deep deep into the sideman thing and I was playing in some very active bands. I was with Chuck Prophet for several years and that included several European tours and multiple trips across the States. Then I was with a band called The Court and Spark who have now become hiss Golden Messenger and again we did lots of touring, I was playing pedal steel exclusively with that band. I also spent time playing with a guy called Lloyd Tripp, a rockabilly guy who had a band called The Vibes and then a later one called The Blubbery Hillbillies, you had to be over 250lbs to be in that band, and he was living in Texas when I was playing with him. I was doing some solo gigs from time to time but I was easily distracted. I was drinking a lot and I didn’t want anything to distract from my drinking. And then for a while I had a straight job, working in an office so you know, stuff got in the way and once I left Chuck’s band and left my job I went back to working in a bar and I was sort of at a loose end but I was always writing. The thing that really kicked things off again was a record I did, a collection of covers called Ballads, Blues and Union Dues, which I recorded live in the studio. I say about that record that anything you want to know about me musically you can find out on that record. So I made that and it was a very affirming thing, a real confidence builder and I was like, Oh, OK, I can do that.
At this point in the interview we were interrupted when Tom got a phone message urging him to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Back to him…
I’ve voted already, I’ve done that. You know, it’s really scary just now. I’ve got a friend who has a silkscreen business and I was thinking of getting a T-shirt done for the tour saying “I did not vote for that motherfucker” but hopefully people can tell that I didn’t. If things don’t turn around on November 6th I don’t know what I’m going to do. This weird nationalism seems to be creeping everywhere. I followed the Brexit vote because I studied in England and I’ve got friends there and I was watching the vote and it was like, it’s close but the big cities haven’t come in yet so it will be alright, and then when the final result came in I couldn’t believe it. A funny thing is that Dan Stuart flew into the UK for a show at Glastonbury with Twin Tones on the day of the Brexit vote. And then later that year in November Dan and I were going to do a tour so he flies in from Mexico on the day of the election and I pick him up and get back to the house. We’re not watching the results because Hilary’s going to win we reckon, so we’re playing guitars, sorting out the tour when my wife comes in and says, “Guys, turn on the TV,” and it’s like this red wave sweeping across the screens and we can’t believe it. So Dan is like some kind of bad luck charm, don’t let him come to your country if something bad is on the ballot. He caused Brexit and he caused Trump! But then here we are talking about music and Trump barges in because there’s no getting around it, there it is. I didn’t get the T-shirt but I’ve got a couple of songs that say a few things about the situation, not directly but it will be there, I’m not afraid to speak up.
Well, unless The Tories call a snap election in the next few weeks, you and Dan should be clear to land. Is there anything else you’d like to say before you head to the airport?
Not really aside from this straight commercial pitch. I’m going to have all my records on sale and I’ll have lots of vinyl, real records. Don’t make me take it home with me, buy them on the night and avoid that hefty postal fee, I’ve covered that for you. Vinyl’s great and records make a great Christmas gift so don’t make me take them back home with me. My baby needs shoes and she likes Italian shoes and they’re expensive so help me out folks.
And with that we let Tom get on with his packing. The tour with Dan Stuart meanders across Europe hitting Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and France before a brace of UK dates. You can see the itinerary here.
The live pictures are from Tom Heyman and Dan Stuart’s Glasgow show in 2016.
What’s inside the mind of the modern man? Well, according to Benjamin Folke Thomas, this fellow is a bit of a dreamer, somewhat insecure in his love life (and even prone to occasional fantasies) but deep down he’s a good guy who worries about the environment and rails against injustice. Importantly he also has a sense of humour, witness the back cover art which has Folke Thomas in a space suit patiently queuing with his shopping in a mini mart – an outsider tasked with mundane tasks.
The 
It can be a daunting task trying to compile a definitive discography of Will Oldham, the Kentucky born Americana polymorph who records as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Palace Brothers, Palace and several other monikers. He’s an inveterate collaborator and has a host of singles and EPs to wade through along with his now lengthy album back catalogue. As far as we can ascertain he has only recorded under his own name on 1997’s Joya so this new release, reworkings of old songs, might be seen as a recap of his quarter century of recording were it not so brief. The true recap is actually in the form of a book of the same name which gathers the lyrics of over 200 songs together with comments from Oldham on their origins and meanings. However, this aural peek into his past is a delightful collection.
Blabber 'n' Smoke 