Formats
PHOER032 - CD
Details
Phono Erotic is proud to announce the debut album by the vehemently Outsiderist, Post-Music Hall, Post-Retro/Post-Modern/Post-Future ensemble that is The Blood Tub Orchestra. This album is an antiquated long-playing digital optical disc data storage unit format containing a collection of late 19th and early 20th Century popular and not so popular music. These lewd, crude and sometimes nude songs and ditties, hailing from the Free And Easies, Taverns, Music Halls, Blood Tubs and Singing Saloons of their era, have been dragged kicking and groaning from their coffins by a motley rabble of musicians from such bands as Transglobal Underground, Furniture, Echobelly, Headbutt, Pulkas and The London Dirthole Company. Long before the blandness of Music Hall’s slow televised death in the 60’s and 70’s, these songs came from an anarchic time of drunken satire, drug ravaged scandal, transvestites, gloriously bad puns, tight skirts, political lampooning, prostitution, punch-ups, patriotism and a pisspot of penny dreadfuls. The Blood Tub Orchestra have taken this stagnant seed and with all the zeal of a sentimental hangover have thrown it up into modern musical parlance. The starved and raging sweatshop is the twin drum and metal barrage of Mr Lewis and Ms Reynolds. The industrial engines are the machines and delightfully horrid bass of Mr Davies. The swaggering mod in the street is the guitar of Ms Smith and the part of the bailiff arranging the transportation of you and your children to the workhouse is sung by Mr Whelan, accompanying himself on the piano. The result is the 19th century’s revenge on our dishevelled 21st one. It seems the Victorian line in rebellious lyric stands as true as ever, from the upbeat post punk of ‘Things Are Worse In Russia’ to a rockabilly re-working of the Charles Dickens’ anachronistic tribute to Crass with the lyrical classic ‘Fine Old English Tory Times’. In contrast, dusting the cobwebs off the sentimental ballad ‘I Cannot Sing The Old Songs’ finds it loaded with stiff upper lip trauma and underlies once again that the psychology of a nation is essentially in the same uncertainty as now, along with a few of the same chord structures. ‘They Can Do Without Us’ and ‘It Aint All Honey And It Aint All Jam’ (the latter performed via full megaphone by Ms Valerie Gwyther) reveal layers of modern gender politics raised and tolerated by the marginal folks of a hundred years ago. Some things never change…likewise the subject the worlds oldest known football song (from sometime between 1880-1900), telling of a great on-field rivalry and carnage on the pitch ending up in further carnage down the pub. The jovially jingoistic ‘We’re Glad You Got A Gun’ a worthy contender for the Worst Song of 1915, is perhaps the cause for many a naïve young dapper ending up the subject of the albums epitaph, ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Blooming Well Dead’, a song that puts the mockers on the smug and enlightened liberalism of the hypocritical vultures at your funeral rearing their ugly heads for your final farewell. This selection of songs range from some of the greatest hits of the day by some of the most famous artists such as Harry Champion, Sam Mayo, Vesta Victoria to some of the greatest obscurities. As examples of the former, guest vocalist Captain Standish adds his somewhat unique tonsular skills to ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life’, (a lampoon of opera), ‘The Daring Young Man On The Flying Machine’, hints at an early LGBT hue and cry, (rumoured once to have been covered by Bowie). ‘Percy From Pimlico’ meanwhile laughs in the face of a common misery with a bit of common thievery. The particularly obscure ‘As You Were Before’ and ‘The Bolshevik’, in which the word Bolshevik turns out to be as much use as the words ‘Trot’ or ‘Lefty’ in this day and age both revel in further anti-social behavior, and there is simply no sensible explanation for the existence of ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt on the Roof of St Pauls’. The cautionary tale that is ‘Never Let Your Braces Dangle’ is, of course, self-explanatory. These ghostly resurrected sounds of music from the ‘kicking over the traces’ generations of yore offer an alternative vision of an over sentimentalized past and a cautionary thought or two to consider in these times of Brexit bolsh and bluster.
Tracks
Things Are Worse In Russia
I Cannot Sing The Old Songs
The Football Match
They Can Do Without Us
Percy From Pimlico
It Ain?t All Honey And It Ain?t All Jam
Never Let Your Braces Dangle
We?re Glad You?ve Got A Gun
The Bolshevik
The Spaniard That Blighted My Life
As You Were Before
The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze
I Dreamt That I Dwelt On The Roof Of St Pauls
Aint It Grand To Be Bloomin? Well Dead
The Fine Old English Tory Times