Playlouder - Music is the Network

If it seems a long time ago that Piranha Deathray fizzled/bowed out of their brief but fiery existence, well, perhaps that’s because it was. Over a year, at any rate, and a year’s as good as a decade in this culture for accelerated music.

In the meantime, Son of King Rebel hasn’t been updating his MySpace or his Blog with any regularity, but has made occasional threats of brilliance in uploaded demos and four in the morning impromptu bedroom performances with audiences press-ganged from anywhere en route twixt pub and pad.

At this point I’d best point out that I lived with songwriter Jeremy Allen for the best (usually best, sometimes worst) part of a year. Does that make me biased? Well of course it does; for one thing, I wouldn’t be here but for that fact. I wouldn’t have been invited. I certainly wouldn’t have known about the gig.

Billed as The Bellicose Butchers, tonight’s band is a coalition of the willing and coerced. A pub rock troupe in the best possible sense: comprising drums, bass, piano, trumpet and electric guitar, with Allen’s voice meandering at the forefront like a penny-begging drunk. Not a syphilitic, no-hoper with gates-of-hell eyes, mind you; more the sort who’ll begin by asking you for twenty pence and end up getting you to write a cheque, and possibly following you home and sleeping with your wife.

I recall SOKR jokingly billing himself once as the unploughed (and unwanted) territory that lay between Nick Cave and Elton John. While this isn’t far from the mark, musically, it’s typically self-defeatist and perhaps a touch too modest.

For an unknown, unnamed bottom-of-the-bill act in a pub in the arse-end of South Of The River, the set positively sparkles with stand-up-and-take-note songs, whose strength of character is undeniable.
 
There’s the cryptic, foot-stomping Tom Waits-esque glory of ‘I Just Wolf Up’, the soul-searching coming-of-age confessional ‘I Don’t Love Jesus No More’, and the beautifully-mundane ‘Uncle Snooker Social Club’, where our narrator fantasises about getting away from the trappings of his relationship to be “the favourite runner up” in a local snooker championship. Well, we all have dreams, don’t we?

This could be the start of something brilliant. And while I may have come to tonight’s gig ready to be convinced, that in itself was with good reason: that I haven’t yet stabbed the man to death is testimony to the fact that these songs are worth waking up to, and indeed singing along to.