Customer Reviews

Balling the Jack: Birth of Nu-Blues

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To paraphrase Frank Zappa, the blues isn't dead, it just smells funny.
Since the big blues boom of the sixties, when every beat group had a few twelve-bar blues in their repertoire, the genre has been slowly and sadly sidelined, firstly by disco and dance culture, then by punk and everything else, until a point was reached when an admission for a fondness for the form was a short-cut to social pariah-hood. By way of self-preservation a sanitized form of the blues entered the mainstream, but politeness never suited it and corporate acceptance served only to further marginalize the genuine article.
Blues had been recorded from the start of the commercial recording industry in the nineteen-twenties and had been handed down in an oral history beginning in Africa countless generations beforehand, so there never could never be any doubt that in the long term it would endure.
Exactly what the blues is and the criteria required to authentically perform it has been endlessly speculated, most fervently during the blues beat boom (q.v. The Bonzo Dog Band - Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?), and the auteur compiler of this collection celebrating its re-invention, Joe Cushley, takes an especially eclectic view.
Taking tracks that are not essentially blues songs by artists who are not essentially blues performers, such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Gary Lucas, Billy Childish and his Famous Headcoats and the Soft Boys, and putting them in the context of a number of idiosyncratic blues and blues-influenced artists ranging from RL Burnside to Captain Beefheart, results in an illuminating and surprisingly coherent listen. The most successful are often those that take the largest liberties with what Joe Cushley calls the "hell-hound sound."
One inevitably speculates on other artists who might have been included in place of the few slightly weaker tracks on the disc, and perhaps excluded due to licensing limitations. The most obvious omissions are Jimi Hendrix who brilliantly revitalized everything he touched, and the pioneering Howlin' Wolf, but recent champions must include PJ Harvey, the White Stripes, Dr John and Little Axe, while honourable mentions should go to Dr Feelgood for keeping the spirit of the blues alive during the punk wars. I look forward to these and names yet unknown to us to inform the sequel.