The Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking 2018 - Part 2

So was Santa good to you all then?  Finished all the turkey and ready for a bit more reflection on 2018 with Blues Enthused?

One of the highlights of the second half of the year was a first visit to the Carlisle Blues Rock Festival back in September, for two out of its three days.   A brilliantly organised affair, it was blessed with a cracking bill, the Saturday night topped off by a set from Thorbjorn Risager & The Black Tornado that was a hit from the minute their guitars starting cranking out the riff to ‘If You Wanna Leave’.

Thorbjorn Risager rocks the flat cap look

Carlisle also offered a first chance for me to see the Chris Bevington Organisation, who offered up one of the most straight ahead, good-time albums of the year, with the rocked up blues outing Cut And Run.  A 9-piece outfit featuring horns, keys, backing singers, and the kitchen sink, they pulled together great songs, quality musicianship and a great sound, in an album that crackled with enthusiasm from start to finish on tracks like 'It Ain't Easy'. 

Worth noting for their willingness to do something a bit different in the album stakes were Big Boy Bloater, with Pills, and Jawbone, with their self-titled debut album.  The Bloat fella’s album may not be solid gold – there are a couple of misfires, for my money – but with his rough-edged rock’n’roll, rougher-edged voice, funny lyrics and penchant for B-Movie tales, as well a neat line in Nick Lowe-ish country fare, he’s still a breath of fresh air - see what you make of 'Friday Night's Alright For Drinking'.  And Jawbone are similarly refreshing, as they take a late Sixties Big Pink vibe and transplant it to 21^stCentury Britain, with a heap of strong songs, contrasting lead vocals from Marcus Bonfanti and Paddy Milner, and a readiness to let Milner’s piano set the tone as much as Bonfanti’s guitar.  They also have a nice way with a lyric, as '2 Billion Heartbeats' demonstrates.

Right now there are a host of great female roots music artists out there in both Britain and America, and one of the standout albums of the year came at the hands of one of them – Kansas City’s Danielle Nicole, who released her second solo album Cry No More back in March - and picked up a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the tail end of the year.  No sign of her coming to Europe for live dates in the near future though – unlike Shemekia Copeland, Ana Popovic and Samantha Fish, who are all going to be within hailing distance for me in the same week in May!  Never mind, here's Ms Nicole casting a 'Hot Spell'.

A new find for me on the female singer front this year was Tierinii Jackson, of Memphis-based soul-blues outfit Southern Avenue, who delivered a crackling performance at the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival in the summer.  If Vintage Trouble are your kind of band, then you may well enjoy Southern Avenue, although they also stir a spoonful of gospel into the mix.  Here they are getting funky on ‘Rock Steady’, with Tierinii Jackson in typical Little Miss Dynamite form.

Danielle Nicole has a quiet evening in

On the book front, this year I’ve been working my way through Stuart Cosgrove’s ‘Soul Trilogy’, comprising Detroit 67, Memphis 68, and Harlem 69.  The books cover a lot of ground, such as the development of Motown and Stax, and key events in black culture like the Detroit riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the emergence of the Black Panthers.  But much of the pleasure is to be found in the characters Cosgrove turns up, many of whom are unfamiliar.

In the latest book it’s interesting to come across someone like Betty Mabry, who was married to Miles Davis for a time, was a friend of Jimi Hendrix, and by the sound of it was an all-round cross-cultural phenomenon.  A catwalk model, club owner, songwriter and singer, Cosgrove paints her as a forceful, networking catalyst in the emergence of jazz-rock and fusion.

Or there’s King Curtis, a workaholic sax player, band leader, arranger, musical director and talent scout, who I must confess I’d never heard of before, but whose mid-Sixties band The Kingpins at one time or another included famed drummer Bernard Purdie, and the still developing Hendrix.  Here they are cooking up a 'Memphis Soul Stew'.  It says something about Curtis’s status that for a while the Kingpins were apparently Aretha Franklin’s preferred backing band.

And with the death of Aretha earlier this year, that seems like a good point at which to close the lid on 2018.  So here is the Queen of Soul, doubtless an inspiration for some of those singers listed above, showing how it’s done on ‘I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You’.

You can find Part 1 of the Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking here.

Big Boy Bloater & The LiMiTs - Pills

If you’re in the market for a blast of aggressive but witty R’n’B, then look no further.  As English as cod and chips, Big Boy Bloater majors on the kind of collision between Chicago R’n’B and Chuck Berry rock’n’roll evident in both early Stones and the Feelgoods.  His 2016 outing Luxury Hobo showed him throwing his own twists into that mix, and Pills repeats the trick.

The title track, with its ascending guitar figure, rocking bass from Steven Oates, and Bloater’s typical gargled-with-broken-glass-this-morning vocals, kicks off a hat-trick of tracks in this vein.  ‘Friday Night’s Alright For Drinking’ may be a bit vin ordinaire in places, but the chorus has plenty of fizz, and in addition to Big Boy’s pinging slide licks it benefits from some classy female

Big Boy Bloater - naturally charming

harmonies that provide extra oomph.  ‘The Saturday Night Desperation Shuffle’ is the real winner though.  A ‘Ballroom Blitz’-like drum rhythm from Matt Cowley sets the tempo, matched by fast-striding bass from Oates, over which the Bloat lays an urgent guitar riff, and a spiky solo.  And while he may not carry the air of menace that Lee’n’Wilko conjured up, he does offer a wry line in observational lyrics.

Pub rock, we’re often reminded by those who were there, wasn’t a sound or a scene, it was just rock music being played in a bunch of London pubs by a variety of different bands. It’s striking though, that when Bloater departs from the forceful R’n’B template, he’s liable to come up with the bobbing Anglo-Country that is ‘Stop Stringing Me Along’, a tale of relationship failure with acoustic strumming and ooh-oohing female backing vocals, that recalls another pub rocker, Nick Lowe.

‘Oops Sorry’ is a bit of lightweight rock’n’roll that’s also in Lowe territory, both musically and lyrically.  A whimsical tale of heartbreak that extols the merits of Gaffa tape and super glue, it features chiming piano and a Latino guitar solo.  And just to round out the pub rock comparisons, ‘Slacker’s Paradise’ is a skipping effort initially redolent of Graham Parker, and a witty vision of consummate idleness with perfectly matched laid back accompaniment.

The back end of the album may contain some efforts that don’t quite hit the bullseye, like the ultimately inconsequential ‘Mouse Organ’, with its inflections of European jazziness, or the closing ‘A Life Full Of Debt’, a melancholy tale of consumerism based on ukulele strumming.  And while ‘The Digital Number Of The Beast’ is a humorous take on “the rise of the machines”, pinging out some musical binary code, it lacks the focus on display elsewhere.

But hey, there’s still room for the quintessentially Bloaterist ‘Unnaturally Charming’, a spooky B-Movie yarn about a young man whose easy charm masks a dangerous misfit, with swirls of fairground organ in the background, jagged guitar counterpointed by more female backing vox, and closing out with a repeated, Dan Auerbach-like guitar lick.

Big Boy Bloater ain’t no teenage guitar hero.  He’s not trying to make some clever crossover into another market.  His act is founded on down to earth elements of rock’n’rollin’ directness, delivered with wit and imagination.  He takes some basic R’n’B virtues, and turns them into something as fresh as a mug of whelks.  Go get a fork and dig in.

Pills is released by Mascot Label Group on 15 June.

Big Boy Bloater tours Britain in September and October - details here.

The Blues Enthused Christmas Stocking 2016 - Part 2

Christmas dinner fully digested?  Good, because here come few more platters of goodies.
You could call 2016 the Year of the Nimmos.  If Stevie Nimmo came up with my favourite studio album of 2016, his brother Alan’s outfit King King released a live album to rank alongside classics of the genre.   To put the icing on the cake, I was there at the Glasgow O2ABC gig in May when it was recorded, so I can testify to the fact that King King Live captured all the crackling intensity of that night.

Jo Harman lets her hair down

The support act on that tour, Dan Patlansky, turned plenty of heads with his live performances.  He also delivered an album, Introvertigo, that emphasised the waves made by its predecessor, Dear Silence Thieves - way more modern than your average blues-rocker, Boo Boo.  Wondering what sounds King King and Patlansky might make if they played together?  Well here they are, giving it big licks on the last night of that tour, with ‘Little Wing’.

A more rough and ready purveyor of originality was Big Boy Bloater, with his album Luxury Hobo.  Founded on R’n’B shot through with pub-rock Estuary Englishness, it still manages to fold in some other musical horizons.  Sadly I had to miss out on an opportunity to see Bloater live.  But the Bloat also does a nice line in quirky videos, so here he is with his band the Limits giving us ‘I Love You (But I Can’t Stand Your Friends)’.  Ah yes, a good old fashioned ‘brackets’ title!

Summertime brought the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, one of the highlights of which was Mr Sipp, the self-styled Mississippi Blues Child.  Now here is a guy who knows how to take classic electric blues and put on a show full of personality.  Check out this award-winning performance from the 2014 International Blues Challenge for evidence.

Vintage Trouble go native in Glasgow

From the Jazz & Blues Festival to the Edinburgh Blues’N’RockFestival, which furnished an early sighting of local band The Rising Souls in their newly electrified four-piece incarnation.  By the time the autumn came they were releasing a new four-track EP - featuring the title track 'Set Me Free' in the course of an impressively taut launch gig full of brand new material.  If you fancy the idea of Led Zeppelin having a love affair with Aretha Franklin, as they put it, then keep tabs on them in 2017.

Singer-songwriter and soul siren Jo Harman also pitched up at the Blues’N’Rock Festival, walking a tightrope between hold-your-breath sensitive ballads and shake-yer-booty bluesy soul.  Next year is a big one for Harman, whose much-touted second studio album People We Become is scheduled for release in February.  Three years have passed since her widely applauded debut Dirt On My Tongue, and it’s time for her to live up to her promise.  Here she is giving it plenty on ‘Through TheNight’.

What better way to close the Christmas Stocking than with American soul’n’blues stirrers Vintage Trouble?  Blues Enthused will actually be seeing out the year with them at their New Year’s Eve gig at the Sage Gateshead, and if they’re as good as they were at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow during the summer then it should be a helluva Hogmanay party.  Get in the festive mood with VT in festival mode, at Glastonbury 2015.

Big Boy Bloater & The Limits - Luxury Hobo

Well, this is an unexpected pleasure.  Until this album fell into my lap, I knew two things about Big Boy Bloater: he hosts a blues show on Team Rock Radio; and I thought his nom de plume sounded – well, kind of dumb.  But pardon my ignorance, because with this album yer man Bloater has managed to produce something refreshingly different.

At its core Luxury Hobo is old-fashioned R’n’B, with a twist of 70s pub rock thrown into the mix.  But rather than echoing Feelgood, the initial impression is of something more akin to George Thorogood and the Destroyers in Half A Boy Half A Man mode – an album whose title track was penned by none other than pub rocker Nick Lowe.

Big Boy Bloater scans the horizon in search of a recovery vehicle

Opening track ‘Devils And Angels’ announces itself with a swirl of fairground organ from Dan Edwards, over a riff reminiscent of Quo’s ‘Caroline’.  It’s one of a couple of tracks that are a tad under-developed, but it’s a gutsy and energetic blast of boogie all the same.  Bloater’s voice could maybe do with some of the rough edges being sandpapered off - but what the hell, this is raw R’n’B not opera.

Credit is due for a bucketful of originality in the lyric department though.  You’ll wait in vain for anything of the “baby done left me” or “woke up this morning” variety on this collection.  Instead the Bloat (as I dare say he’s known to his friends) treats us to a range of funny, off-kilter tales such as the B-Movie stomp of ‘It Came Outta The Swamp’, with its stinging slide work, and the cartoon-ish Futurama of ‘Robot Girlfriend’.

There’s a bit more going on here than just some idle laughs though.  Bloater has suggested that the material on Luxury Hobo emerged partly as a response to a bout of depression a couple of years back, and there’s a sense of alienation about a number of the tracks, whether in the reaction of the townsfolk in ‘. . . Swamp’, or the user-mentality of the guy with the robot girlfriend.

The atmosphere is more unsettling still in ‘I Got The Feeling Someone’s Watching Me’, its air of paranoia underlined by an eerie arrangement that evokes French ‘tango-musette’, of all things.  ‘Luxury Hobo Blues’, meanwhile, finds Bloater asking why, in the midst of a more than acceptable lifestyle, “still everyday I got to medicate my brain”.  As an essay in plenty not being enough it’s a darn sight more original than Chickenfoot’s ‘Dubai Blues’ for example, which is essentially just an enjoyable hard rock reworking of ‘I Ain’t Got You’.

And that air of originality emerges as one of the strengths of the album, and not just in the lyrics.  The foundations may be R’n’B, but Bloater also samples other styles in pleasingly wonky fashion, rather like Bath’s indie-soul mob The Heavy.

Still, Bloater and his band The Limits can also do it (fairly) straight, as on the soulful take on differences among friends that is ‘All Things Considered’, and the good time pub rock of the acidly witty closing track ‘Not Cool Man’.  The end result is an album with a down-and-dirty charm that will doubtless have plenty punters giving it a thumbs up.

Luxury Hobo is released on 26 February 2016.