Two nights in Welwyn Garden City: Wreckless Eric @ the Green Room, 29th Oct 04
Another night, another crowd… or not. Friday night fails to get off to a great start, since when I arrive I’m the third paying customer, and the first act had just been going to go on… numbers, er, swell somewhat by the end of the night, but what a lot the others missed…
Local Alan Cowley provides reliable support with a set of calmly politicised songs, in his punk Bowie vein, after accompanying Mark Astronaut’s ‘Don’t Think About It’ in the night’s first appearance of an old punk star. Alan’s ‘Johnny Get Lost’ is a catchy way to say goodbye, while ‘Dancing for Democracy’ sounds like a cynical version of ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’. Nice.
Eric Golding, greyish, T-shirt, jeans, guitar, hectoring voice, makes those long-standing curmudgeons seem comfortable and happy. One of his first songs is one of his earliest, a bona fide hit, part sung in French “to try to impress a girl”; and partway through he stops singing, to tell us how the girl finished with him, how he ended up moving to France, and of course he ended up learning that the lyrics of his popular song made no real sense at all. And all the way through he keeps the same riff going, as if this were the normal way that anyone might tell a story, and it stops sounding like music and becomes just like the noise you might ignore from the party below. But it’s insistent, eating away at your ears.
You know how music journo’s often say that hearing singers like Black Francis is like being accosted by a cider-ravaged tramp, who insists on shouting his nonsensical life story into your crumbling body? This has doubtless happened to very few writers, and it would hardly be as enjoyable as Pixies’ stream-of-consciousness product. But Wreckless Eric’s set is reminiscent of the same thing. Perhaps it’s a kind of vicarious masochism; perhaps it’s that enjoyment found in laughter from “there but for the grace of God go I”-type situations, or perhaps it’s taking the piss. Darkness does have an odd attraction, especially when set to a good bluesy tune. Whatever, the mix of cynicism and emotion in this man is invigorating.
The music is brutal at times - with electric Rickenbacker he’s an old cockney Sonic Youth, but switching to acoustic doesn’t temper his mood – he uses a strange box to accompany himself too, which just seems to sound like an angry hum. It’s good that he’s not a grumpy old man, but angry. Laying into Brian McFadden in one obscene rant, or the breadth of England’s town centres, housewives, being local, and “a dilapidated parade of shops in a parallel dimension” – and, of course, the twist of this universe is that it’s exactly the same as our own- he makes vivid descriptions entirely un-picturesque. The picture would be like a black and white photo of a lone tree in winter, covered in shit. ‘33s and 45s’ – about splitting records with an ex - is an epic howler so grim and bleak and horrible its length is hard to bear, but entirely necessary. When he follows it with his other hit ‘Whole Wide World’ – as covered by Laptop some years ago – I can’t help but interpret this nice nursery-rhyme style pop song through the filter of what’s come before, and it’s got the air of a psychopathic stalker. “I’d go the whole, wide world, to find her…” I almost hope that nice Badly Drawn Boy might sound this intense when he’s older.
Album review coming soon. More in WGC, the previous night, unplugged
www.wrecklesseric.com / www.welwynmusic.com
