This Heat's influence,or,connections with the French underground seems to be somewhat larger then expected,as here we find The Heats erstwhile drummer and singer, Mr Charles Hayward, hooking up with another couple of other drummer boys,....namely French 'rock in opposition' bloke Guigou Chenevier, and some geezer called Rick Brown.....yes THEE Rick Brown.......nah! I haven't heard of him either! But Rick probably hasn't heard of us too so we're quits!?
Three Drummers Drumming,as it doesn't say in the famed Christmas carol, but three,yes,THREE,drummers does indeed apply here! Can you imagine the creative arguments in a band with three drummers? As Gary Glitter and Adam Ant can testify, two drummers max in a band, or there's gonna be trouble. In fact it was Drummer trouble that ended Adam and The Ants and burdened the world with Adam's much maligned Solo career. With Glitter, the obvious problem was,funnily enough, actually Glitter himself(a fine example of a singer that hangs out with musicians).
Drummers are famously the guys who do hang around with musicians.The guys who die mysteriously,choke 'ON' vomit,aren't needed outside of touring, and are forever trying to impose their daft ideas on the rest of the group; like John Bonham's 'Moby Dick', or Rat Scabies' "Stab yor Back", as if trying,accidentally of course, to move that hilarious joke well into the realms of observational comedy.
Y'see, Drummers actually do think they are musicians,and like the stupid son of the family, are always trying to make the audience look at them and see what they're doing.This usually involves hitting the drums as loud as possible,and taking copious amounts of drugs....as in, more than you....look maw I'm Dancin' !
However much the average drummer harbors sparkling thoughts of their own genius within their considerable ego's ;one has to concede that all this drummer hate certainly does NOT apply to the great Charles Haywood, or his vocal sound-a-like Bobby Wyatt,who are indeed the granddaddies of the Rock In Opposition fad of the late seventies, otherwise known as Prog Rock under any other name.
So, what we expect are three drummers busting their balls trying to Out-paradiddle each other,and to impress each other with their rudimentary talents on 'other' instruments.
It's kinda Punk without the Punk, and This Heat without the Heat, which leaves us with.... 'This'?
Haywoods vocals are as vulnerable and Wyatt-esque as This Heat and Camberwell Now, which adds much needed identity to the dreary Drum-Off. So when Haywood didn't turn up for the follow up albums,they just ended up sounding like Camberwell Now but without the tunes.
An obvious, but bold Idea, balancing precariously on the round shoulders of the limited tonal range of a well tuned drum kit.
Tracklist:
1.Noisy Champs
2.Sunday And Dimanche
3.Identity Parade
4.Polar
5.Post-Polar
6.Dernier Solo Avant L'Autoroute
7.White Elegance
8.The Letter
9.Dernier Rendez-Vous Au Gord
10.Flintstone
11.Maksymenko
12.3 Hommes Et Un Mouchoir
1.Noisy Champs
2.Sunday And Dimanche
3.Identity Parade
4.Polar
5.Post-Polar
6.Dernier Solo Avant L'Autoroute
7.White Elegance
8.The Letter
9.Dernier Rendez-Vous Au Gord
10.Flintstone
11.Maksymenko
12.3 Hommes Et Un Mouchoir
26 comments:
you are post ironic, no? Rick Brown is in everything.
If you just look for Rick Brown's participation in a band,
it's a good listen, and you never even notice the drumming!
Also, Adam Ant's drummer Chris Hughes went on to do a
wonderful album called "Shift". All based on Steve Reich's music.
Literally. Real re-interpretations. Something very nice and
non-egobag about it. Still sounds fresh to me. Has done other "classical" type music under the name Chris Merrick Hughes.
I am proto-ironic in a post ironic sort of way,but mostly real time irony.
Rick Brown???...no i really meant it...i guess its his vanilla name,just slightly less anonymous than Mick Brown.
There you see...merrick goes minimal....if that isn't an argument not to have more than one drummer in your pop group then that's it.
Check out Rick Brown's excellent and very Beefheartian 80s band Fish and Roses. And then maybe listen to his current band 75 Dollar Bill. Alright ?
Anything you say Brad. Fish and Roses it is.
Checked out,,,Fish'n'roses right up my alley,of course.
If I remember right (what are the odds?) Rick Brown came onto my radar in a trio called V-Effect, with sax and female singer who played bass, and I have a record by them somewhere. They were diversely capable and eccentric in ways that got the Knitting Factory to support them. There was a personnel shakeup and they became Fish and Roses, and I managed to talk a goth club in Cambridge MA (which I live just north of) into booking them so I could see them. I liked them a lot, rather like a subtler Dog Faced Hermans.
Again if I remember right, Les Batteries was Guigou's idea. They toured America but without Charles *Hayward* (sorry Jonny, you got his name wrong!) and again I pulled some strings to get them a convenient gig. Rick did Harry Partch's "The Letter" solo, voice and drums (hardly different from the version on the album).
Sorry I haven't kept in better touch. I read the blog every day (well, every day you post) but I'm trying overall to be less of an arrogant knowitall.
No, no, stop everything you're doing and listen to "Stop Those Songs" by V-Effect. THAT Rick Brown.
Next he's gonna tell ya he's never heard of Savage Republic.
Anyways, Rick Brown: V-Effect and Run On also recommended.
Savage Re....who???
Another thing to avoid, other than too many drummers in a room, is never let it be known that you've never heard of a group or musician on a nerdy website such as this.....the living embodiment of that Nick Hornby book on the subject "Hi-Fidelity".
Thanx for the curiosity and for your great blog!
@mandolinny: incidentally, do you recall the year Les Batteries toured the states? For some reason, Guigou was really into Amoebic Ensemble (frankly, too circus-y for me) and I never quite understood how that came to be--I think their record was on some Frenchy label even?
Also, was "High Fidelity"--the stupid movie, that is--the one in which some guy describes Slint as a "grunge" band and says they "broke up" in '94? What the hell, when did people stop actually researching shit?
The slint gaff was a deliberate mistake,to highlight the fact that most of us music 'experts' generally pretend to know everything about the subject,but don't.....don't think that was in the book though....just like my not recalling Rick Brown incident.
Apparently Hi-Fidelity is now a TV series?
But is it true that Guigou Chenevier once shot his competitor in a drum battle? Inquiring nerd-minds want to know.
Sorry, parmalee, I seldom remember chronologies, so it's all a blur...
But I can say something pertinent to Guigou's interest in the Amoebic Ensemble. I promoted Etron Fou's first American gig, opening for National Health (with Alan Gowen) in an old vaudeville-era theater in Boston that some obsessive was trying to restore. The Etrons and their soundman stayed in my basement for a couple days and rehearsed, which was amazing! The cliche about drummers is that they never quite grow up, but in Guigou that totally worked for his aesthetic (and you can see it documented on the cover art of the live album they made from this tour-- Guigou is represented as a schoolboy :-). Anyway my then-roommate later played incidental percussion in the Amoebic Ensemble, I think on the first couple of records; I wonder if Guigou had taught him any tricks...
Jonathon Thomas? Yeah, he was fantastic--though I didn't get many opportunities to see him play as I was living mostly on the west coast til mid/late '90s. I've always liked those sort of kitchen sink percussionists, who'll play pretty much any and every object that'll produce a sound. A bit like what Rick Brown does now with his quasi-cajon in 75 Dollar Bill. Funnily, I somehow inherited a big box of JT's old cassette tapes at one point. A lot of kraut-rock, as I recall, including some Mani Neumeier rarities! (That was pretty exciting in the late '90s.) And Etron Fou and National Health on the same bill? Damn.
Jon Thomas?...in the uk that is yet another hilarious noun applicable to the male member....and he's a drummer you say?
But that Chris Hughes album really is quite good -If you like that Music ala Ping Pong et al, that you posted...
Jonny, it's exactly for that reason he always introduced himself as "Jonathan." He wasn't a "real" (as in schooled) drummer, he was an inspired amateur, like most of us. (I get arbitrarily close to the line; I can't sight-read but if I'm really hot to learn something complicated I can puzzle it out from the dots.) His original instrument was a set of canisters for flour and sugar etc from somebody's kitchen, and he kept supplementing it with found objects, like bits of cast iron hardware from the wharves. Later he married a cowpunk singer named Angel Dean and wrote her some song lyrics, but AFAIK didn't play in her band.
There's not much that's more off-putting than a drummer sight reading music.
I did go to a 'jam' session once...and only once where all the non-drummers read music as they..er jammed....no...in fact i did twice in some jazzy affair back in the noughties.Not Great... I don't even believe in keeping time.
Check out Dominik Blum's Steamboat Switzerland. Organist (Blum), bassist and drummer all reading sheet music. Incredibly annoying, yet it's hard to take your eyes off of them. Dominik also plays some kuhhhraaazy piano music. One of my bands played a show with them in Rotterdam way back when, and they were seriously intense--Dominik was prepared to sever my head from my body over my endorsement of the Fender SOLID STATE Twin Reverb for organs--transistor organs, to boot. Though it was all in good fun...I think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR0zdsz9g54&t=636s
Haven't thought about this stuff for ages, so I figured I should write it out lest I forget it again!
In 1978 or 79 Bill Bruford was touring the US with Dave Stewart in his band. Stewart told me that National Health would continue with Alan Gowen on keyboard, and was planning an American tour, and gave me contact information.
I learned that Etron Fou was also planning a tour around the same time (I don't remember exactly how, but probably Frith was involved) and thought that would be a pretty cool double bill: even though Rock In Opposition doesn't resemble the Canterbury aesthetic too closely, I didn't imagine an aficionado of either would be turned off by the other.
The hall was called the Modern Theatre, built originally in the 1870s, later a venue for burlesque, thereafter adapted to cinema (Wikipedia says it was the first house in Boston to show a movie with sound, The Jazz Singer), and fallen onto hard times. If I remember right, I saw the Ornette Coleman Quartet there, and during Charlie Haden's bass solo I walked up to the third floor balcony to prove I could still hear him up there. I can't remember the name of the guy who bought it, but his dream was to nurture a working theatre company. Nevertheless, he let me book two weird European jazz-rock bands.
My skills as a promoter were negligible. Mainly I talked it up to my musician friends and my college radio friends. Total attendance was something like 167 people.
Etron Fou was everything I'd hoped for. They played about an hour, some bits from their most recent release, Les Trois Fous Perdegagnent (Au Pays Des...), but lots of new compositions from all three of them. They did get their live album out of it, but not from my show, it's performances from New York and Hartford.
National Health's set made me realize how crucial Dave Stewart was, at least for my tastes: I associate peak Canterbury with his keyboard voices, no matter whose composition it was. Gowen played an 88 key Fender Rhodes (which I had to rent for him from one of the vendors around Berklee, and write a check for the entire purchase price as a deposit, so I had a negative bank balance that day until I returned the instrument and reclaimed the check, which I burnt) and a little monophonic synth, so... Indeed, for me, they never cohered as a band at all: Gowen's tunes sounded like Gowen with sidemen, Miller's tunes sounded like Miller with sidemen, etc. I recall they did "Dreams Wide Awake" and "Squarer for Maud" from the latest LP, and "The Rose Sob" off one of Greaves' solo albums. Nothing I hadn't already heard on record left a mark.
I paid off the bands and lent Miller a Fender speaker cabinet for the rest of the tour, which he did return to me. Cost me a couple thousand dollars overall, but I got some good stories out of it. Etron Fou came over twice more in the '80s and again I found them performance spaces, and by the last tour (1985) I'd actually bought a house (had a good job by then) so they could stay here. They had the keyboard player by then, and she wanted a specific model of amplifier, the Roland JC-120 with that trademark chorus sound that was everywhere in the '80s, so I bought one. Richard Sinclair used it too, some years later.
Guigou called me up last year; he's writing a book about Etron Fou and wanted to know what I remembered.
And that's all I can think of now.
Gotta laugh at Europeans making very specific equipment requests. Always wondered if they'd even bothered to review the guarantees: pretty damn low in the U.S., and more than half of that is going for gas (or petrol, as they say) to get you to the next show. A fairly well known Japanese act once requested a grand piano--not cheap, as you're also paying for several people to move the damn thing--and then they did prepared piano stuff on it! Fortunately, this was a friend's task--not mine--but I always wondered how the return on that thing went over.
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