Critically, Graham Parker's early 80s albums are usually dismissed as lightweight. To be fair both the excellent Another Grey Area and the less-then-excellent The Real Macaw do suffer from glossy production and perfunctory sessionmen back-up. Parker is Parker of course and while there was a let-up in the vitriol (lest he sneer himself into a corner) his lyrics remained knife-like.
(Can you imagine Elvis Costello or Joe Jackson rocking this hard in 1983?)
So what a dark joy it is to find this out-of-print live show broadcast on the horribly-named King Biscuit Flower Hour in 1983 which delivers more heavyweight, spark-squeezing performances of the songs from those more nettlesome albums.
"We'd play some gigs where the whole front row was swarming with kids who read somewhere that i was the Godfather of Punk...so I had to keep up by being more angry.
Graham Parker
By 1979, Graham Parker had ditched the Rumour horns and a lot of his beloved R&B tricks. Instead, the vicious rocker part of his personae dominated what may be Parker's defining work, Squeezing Out Sparks and the under-appreciated 1980 follow-up, The Up Escalator. The problem was that anger had begun to lose its currency against the flighty values of the ascendant New Romantic bands like Spandau Ballet. Like every other great artist in the early 80's, Parker would be forced to grapple with the epidemic of synthetic mediocrity that had infected the musical culture.
This 1980 concert shows off Parker and the Rumour as flat-out rockers, playing almost exclusively tracks from their two most recent albums. Like The Ramones, they're speeding everything up (check out "Manoeuvres" above for proof) but they're disciplined, never letting the sheer velocity knock them off their game.
Graham Parker showed Britain's punks you could be angry without being ignorant. However, as the punks got angrier Parker felt the need to match them hate for hate, while continuing to school them on how to focus that anger. Once again, Dave Thompson's London's Burning provides the money quotes:
"Our attitude to punk was, we were kind of jolted." We were in a field of one, doing things like : "You Can't Hurry Love" really aggrressively, doing reggae with this angry attitude; we had it all together and suddenly we were not the only ballgame. There was this thing called [Punk Rock]....and it was a bit scary for us. So we thought we'd better crank it up another level and came back really nasty."
And Parker's records did grow more vitriolic throughout the seventies. So to follow up the live show from '76, here's the ever-more belligerent Parker's Live on the Test. This set is made up of BBC TV performances on The Old Grey Whistle Test from 17 March 1977 and 20 March 1978. It's further proof of Parker and The Rumour's live fire-power. If, like Parker himself, you believe Mutt Lange's production of his second album, Heat Treatment, is sterile, then you'll find these versions raw and bloody enough to be a bio-hazard.
MRML readers, leave us a comment about your favourite era(s) of GP's work.
"(My) songs had an unthematic apocalyptic feel that was tough and hard and somehow developed an extremely aggressive stance which was a reaction against the progressive music scene. It was rebellious youth, how society was controlling us, and the other hippie themes - but rocking hard while doing it."
Graham Parker
Graham Parker killed pub rock.
Pub rock was an umbrella term for dozens of mid-70s English groups, each playing their own amalgam country-r&b-rockabilly in gritty pubs rather than stadiums. It's a fascinating era, as the films Oil City Confidential and Sex & Drugs & Rock n' Roll will remind us. However, to those raised after punk, some of those bands can sound timid, as if they feared creating something too new.
Parker, when he broke out with Howlin' Wind in July 1976, was brash as hell and damn sure he was onto something new.
Dave Thompson, in his minutiae-packed memoir London's Burning, records Parker's reaction to hearing one of the former bands of a member of this then-backing band, The Rumour. "I was amazed to find out it was some sort of soft wimpy country rock. I thought, 'What the fuck has this got to do with what I'm doing. I don't get it! People are calling me Pub Rock , what is this?'"
Like the pub rockers, Parker revered the raw vitality of sixties rockers but like the punks to come he wanted to clear the deck and start again.
More on Parker is yet to come, but till then here's part two of That's When You Know, which is actually the legendarily rare Live at Marble Arch recorded with the Rumour. I kept the two parts separate because they are completely different eras and styles and were likely only forced to co-habitate to help sales before it went out of print (though it now fetches $150.00 on Amazon). Its a stunning speed-drenched set of originals (plus a trio of well-chosen R & B covers) perpetrated one sunny afternoon in July of 1976 before an audience of American record executives.
Though the Government of Canada executed Metis rebel leader Louis Riel for high treason in 1885 ("Though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour" said our first Prime Minister, Sir John A McDonald), we Manitobans now get a statutory holiday in the ass-crack of winter to celebrate him as the founder of our Keystone Province. I could tell you why this change of fortunes isn't mere historical revisionism (also known in more hysterical circles as "Political correctness gone wild!") but is in fact par for the course in the creation of national historical narratives or I could play you some obscure rock n' roll by an under-appreciated English eccentric. I don't even have to tabulate the votes, do I?
So, fickle madames et monsieurs, in celebration of this holiday (randomly placed on the third Monday in February), here's British garage-punk legend Billy Childish and his Headcoats, garbling "Louie, Louie" into "Louis Riel". .
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Critically, Graham Parker's early 80s albums are usually dismissed as lightweight. To be fair both the excellent Another Grey Area and the less-then-excellent The Real Macaw do suffer from glossy production and perfunctory sessionmen back-up. Parker is Parker of course and while there was a let-up in the vitriol (lest he sneer himself into a corner) his lyrics remained knife-like.
