root salad Blood Tub Orchestra
The dark punk roots of music hall? Jamie Renton meets a band with an industrial strength thump.
he Blood Tub Orchestra take the sounds of Victorian and Edwardian music hall and commit unspeakable acts upon them, dragging them back to their uncouth punky roots with the dark irreverence that only those who understand and love a tradition can muster. Their debut album, The Seven Curses Of The Music Hall (Phono Erotic), features fif- teen songs originally performed between 1835 and 1926, here imbued with the scuzzy spirit of garage rock and industrial- strength thump.
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The five-piece band originally came together in 2013 when singer, keyboard man and guitarist Tim Whelan (of Trans- global Underground fame) and bassist Ash- ley Davies finally found the time to work on the music hall-based project they’d been talking about for years. “I’d done some stuff with the Imagined Village,” recalls Tim, when I get him and Ashley round a pub table. “Strange things with English tunes of various sorts. But I was being tormented by this other stuff that hadn’t been used.”
“There was a voice in my head going
‘You have to do a version of Never Let Your Braces Dangle and you have to do it like this.’ The arrangement was in my head com- plete. I didn’t put it there, it just appeared.” Like much of what BTO do, the resulting version of Harry Champion’s 1909 jolly non- sense song is full of stomp and distortion, calling to mind The Fall, Tom Waits and Cap- tain Beefheart. From there on in, their sound just grew like a particularly virulent strain of mould.
“It goes back to Christmas Day and Box- ing Day round my grandparents’ house,” says Ashley, of his interest in music hall songs. “A little bit too much whisky in the tea and then the banjo and all these rude songs come out. They’re in my head and I don’t even realise it half the time.”
“We tried to escape from the sentimen- tal stickiness of it all,” he says. “That was the corpse of the thing. My take on it is that the hard stuff mostly got killed off in the First World War. It got watered down coinciding with the morals of society changing, so that only a few of the more sentimental songs survived after that.”
“A lot of the time the arrangements suggest themselves,” explains Tim. “For example, with The Fine Old English Tory Times, which Charles Dickens wrote as a par- ody of A Fine Old English Gentleman (a song which no-one has ever decided whether it was a parody or not itself), it just so hap- pens that the tune sounds like rockabilly.”
“It’s the Irish roots of rockabilly,” reck-
ons Ashley. “Rockabilly was the Transglobal Underground of its day. Mixing all those dif- ferent styles together.”
They chanced upon a copy of The Greatest Hits Of Whitt Cunliffe. “The well- known Spoonerism,” as Tim refers to him. “His shtick was that anything he sung about, he didn’t really sound like he cared one way or the other. So, the song of his we recorded, They Can Do Without Us, is all about women taking over and not needing men. He really doesn’t mind if they do or if they don’t. It’s all one to him.” Their version features New Orleans-style piano (the closest the album gets to the kind of pub knees-up with which this material is usually associated).
The Football Match is the oldest known football song and BTO really go to town on it. “I found a version of it from the 1930s by the guy who originally recorded it when he was very young,” says Ashley. “And it’s almost the same as ours, if you take the punk rock element out of it. He does that thing where he’s gasping for breath all the way through it, as part of his act.”
“There’s a question of context,”
explains Tim. “With something like They Can Do Without Us or The Football Match
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it’s just a new version of the song; we’re channelling what they did. When we’re doing something like We’re Glad You’ve Got A Gun, that’s another matter, because we’re twisting it into something completely different to what they meant. So, you have two approaches.”
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first saw the band perform in a Lon- don blues bar. Music hall as the UK blues? The two have got more in com- mon than you might think. “I was reading in this old book about Vesta Victo- ria,” Ashley explains, referring to the origi- nal singer of It Aint All Honey And It Aint All Jam which is covered on the album. “She was one of the first music hall celebrities to go to America, when they started opening halls of their own over there. And apparent- ly, her style of dress and delivery really influ- enced the early women blues singers.”
But, more than anything, music hall, especially the way BTO hammer it out, is the sound of our country’s forgotten radical past. “It was the punk rock of its day,” agrees Ashley. “It was protest music. Stick- ing one or two fingers up, as appropriate. Having a go at the toffs. The music hall was a space where people could do that.”
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