This is a strange one indeed. As album reviews go, I’ve
often a frame of reference that is invariably the music, the band members or
the genre.
This is way different.
I’ve always been slightly fascinated (as have, I’m sure,
lots of you) by the Scottish gang culture. When I was a wee boy growing up in
Coatbridge and latterly Airdrie in the seventies, those round-shouldered guys
huddled at café corners smoking and talking in impenetrable growls about
“leaders aff” and the like (my old man, who was a beat cop back then, used to
describe them as “boot boys”) were an endless source of enthrallment as were
those letters daubed on walls that denoted gang names. This was in the days
before spray paint, mind, so they were,
literally, daubed.
“Mavis Toi”. “Tongs” “Fleeto”. “Yobboz”. “Derry ”.
“CYT”. “Goucho”. “Tamla Hill”. “Bar-L”
I still have no idea what most of them mean but there was a
certain glamour attached to these memories for me that was quickly eradicated
as I got older.
I was once dragged up a close in Coatdyke in the late seventies by three guys who were trying to get my biker jacket and do harm to my then-slender punk rock good looks. I remember one of them whispering “stab the cunt, stab him” before I managed to slither my way out of their grasps. My two erstwhile “mates” had meantime legged it up the road to Airdrie, leaving me to my fate.
I was once dragged up a close in Coatdyke in the late seventies by three guys who were trying to get my biker jacket and do harm to my then-slender punk rock good looks. I remember one of them whispering “stab the cunt, stab him” before I managed to slither my way out of their grasps. My two erstwhile “mates” had meantime legged it up the road to Airdrie, leaving me to my fate.
This was followed by the then, I suppose, rise of the ned.
Maybe they were always there; maybe I just hadn’t noticed them as a youth but
the gangs of skip cap, trackie-wearing, buckie drinking hoolie seems like a
relatively new phenomenon to me nowadays.
You may wonder what this has to do with the current Scottish
music scene, traditionally an island of respite from the squadrons of neds that
inhabit the country. Well, here’s the answer.
SYVDOH 1 is the new album from Sea Kings main-man Brian
Canning and his co-conspirator Ralph Hector.
The Sea Kings were one of Glasgow’s lost treasures; they
rarely gigged and their one and only album was a slice of Nick Cave meets The
Triffids meets Neil Young at a convention of mid to late 20th
Century history enthusiasts. Yep, that good.
It was also ram-packed with truly great songs and I really
wished they’d stuck around.
Anyway, Canning and Hector have created this first in a duo
of albums that use the SYVDOH as a metaphoric vehicle.
The SYVDOH were an eighties gang from the Shettleston area
who went by the glorious moniker Sandyhills
Young Venny Disciples Of Hate which, whatever way you look at it, is an
incredible name for anything.
Taking the local myths and stories and half-remembered
truths of Canning (BC as he’s referred to in the lyrics) who grew up around
these characters, they’ve crafted an album that defies description at times.
The music is, for the most part, drum-free and often
consists of hushed vibrato guitar chords and gentle figures and spare, ghostly
piano trills. The lyrics are intoned in spoken word and with the Glasgow vernacular well
and truly intact.
There are some clever little lyrical tricks- I particularly
like the Elvis-referencing “In the Shetto” refrain of “Empty Pockets” and the eerie
“Glasgow 1989” has some alliteration that’s grin-inducing despite the subject
matter. I guess if you’re not Glaswegian, you may need some translation- some
of the references are very much of the city and its subcultures. Despite this,
the album is something you can’t help being enveloped in. There are touches of
Tom Waits at times and a pathos and dread that evokes the aforementioned Mr
Cave or a gothic, alcohol-ridden Ivor Cutler with the irreverence of “Life In A
Scotch Sitting Room” replaced with a very, very black, murderous humour.
You need to hear this, it’s like nothing else doing the
rounds just now and its nice to hear a record that has a literary and erudite
theme; it’s a bit of a change, I guess.
The second part, SYVDOH 2 is due out this month and promises
to weave the pop big guns through the commentary- they mention Bowie and Prince
in the press release- and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Come ahead ya bass.
