03.01.10
Brit Idiosyncracy Always Waives the Rules
Over the weekend DD ‘discovered’ Kevin Coyne, an old British rocker/singer/songwriter/poet who passed away in 2002.
A colleague on the I Love Music chat board piqued my interest:
Anybody care about Kevin Coyne? Eccentric British guy, early ’80s. The one album I have, In Living Black And White from 1973, is a live one; his guitarist plays pretty loud rock, though his band doesn’t much — come closest in “Eastbourne Ladies” and “Mummy,” maybe. He has a Joe Cocker growl that occasionally sounds a little Ian Hunter, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of tunes. (Maybe the studio albums are more tuneful, I dunno.) Sings about insane asylums (used to work in one according the liner notes), suicidal fat girls, burning down the world with turpentine, America being a land of disease, and British class stuff I don’t understand much. Don’t know what to make of the guy.
It immediately sent me off in search of Coyne records from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies.
Much of his material has been posted to the Internet, so it certainly wasn’t hard.
There are a couple old videos of Coyne at a festival and a Rainbow appearance broadcast on the Beeb, now available on YouTube.
“Strange Locomotion,” from a ’75 Rainbow show shows a young Andy Summers (later famous in the Police) on guitar.
It’s stomping Brit rhythm & boogie. And since embedding is disabled it is here.
“Eastbourne Ladies,” from the 1974 album, Marjory Razorblade, is similar.
Performed in front of a festival audience in the Seventies, it’s boogie with the guys and gals bopping in a polite hippies we’re-having-a-party-in-Blighty
way. The camera pans back to show it’s next to a pasture, the cows grazing unperturbed. Coyne has a pair of Walter Brennan ‘real McCoy’ farm pants on and humps a pole a little. He asks if even the big black cow would give him some money.
This was back when you could look real crappy and the crowd loved you for it.
Another great tune is “House On the Hill,” a compelling country folk whine about what a local insane asylum was like. Coyne was a social worker in the mental illness system and his songs about it capture this bleak part of English life.
“Eastbourne Ladies” is one his career hight points. His gruff voice, occasionally spitting out a Wolfman Jack howl, is backed by a “Highway 61 Revisited” rhythm thing, except the song is about snobby high class dames who look nice.
Coyne wonders if they go to bed wearing crowns.
“Holiday in Spain” — another tune from the same album, is a spoof on Brit package holidays to the title country set to a flamenco beat.
The Spaniard waiting on the table frightens and offends the British tourists, looking to make their white skin turn a little brown on vacation. The vacationers think the man looks like a gangster from an evil side of town. Yes, there’s certainly risk to the sensibilities when holidaying in places where everyone doesn’t look like you.
Marjory Razorblade is a very good album with a unique taste of its own. Coyne gets his country folk blues complaints and japes going but always follows after awhile with a thumping piece of R&B pub rock — like “Chicken Wing.”
Coyne is a master of of these tones and styles, using his idiosyncratic voice and lyrics so well within the spare arrangements that he always sounds natural bending them to to completely odd purposes.
Speaking of idiosyncracy, it would be a hard person who wouldn’t break out laughing at Coyne’s “Karate King” with lyrics like this:
His white and muscled flexing at all the passing girls, smashing his way through the window frame, ripping apart his mother’s pearls — they’re lieing on the dressing table … Chop! Chop!
If you see the Karate King: Help him! Help him! Comment on his pommaded hair, tell him he would have been an excellent kamikaze pilot in the Second World War! That’s what the Karate King wants to hear … in the gymnasium.
Priceless in the context of rock ‘protest’ music, really.
Which brings us, dear readers, to Coyne’s “Good Boy.”
If there’s a theme song that’s better for this blog, I can’t imagine it.
The song delivers sarcasm and class resentment in ways that are beyond 99 percent of American pop music artists. While Frank Zappa comes to mind, it was rare that he was so musically direct. Since it’s a cut off the original Marjory Razorblade record, it probably won’t last long on the video channel.
Closing out, here’s some Coyne fast boogie. Obviously, the older and uglier you are the better you get at it. I’m serious.