There's A Pub On The Corner

 

From time to time it is necessary for me to leave my musical road and have to go back to the roots where handmade songs were made. If I have this mood and go back to The Singing Loins, a low-fi folk band from Kent, formed by Chris Broderick in 1990. I love their simple yet melodious songs, which often tell of the everyday lives of ordinary people, and the fervor with which they are performed. Sometimes I think they wrote the best songs The Pogues never recorded. In better times, there may be nothing better than sitting in a pub with a glass of beer and listening to The Singing Loins.

The Singing Loins - There's a Pub on the Corner

The Singing Loins - Skinner's Rats

The Singing Loins - Monsters Ashore

Billy Childish & The Singing Loins - I Don't Like The Man That I Am

Back To Basics

 

If an musician dies the papers are full of news about it and many epitaphs were written in the internet. But sometimes you miss this sad news. This happened to me when I searched for some news about The Singing Loins and I got aware that the mastermind of this band, Chris Broderick, died five weeks ago. He formed one of the best raw folk-punk bands in the late 90's. He was close to Billy Childish and the Medway Delta scene. I had always a big fondness to this little band because I really enjoyed what they made. The Singing Loins were just a duo playing stomping folk with a very punk attitude. Their lyrics tell of the everyday and the stories about people we all know very well. A friend once tried me to explain that they made songs to drink by and it is not totally wrong but every song you can sing with is a great song. 

The Singing Loins - The Pub On The Corner

The Singing Loins - Monsters Ashore

The Singing Loins - Chatham Girls

Wild BillyChildish

It was time for a feature of one of the only punk musician that is still working today. Billy Chidlish mad tons of records during the last decades. Even on his own moniker and also as Thee Headcoads, Buff Medways, The Singing Loins and many others. I still had a feeling for his music because he always walked his very own and unique way. That is true punk spirit to me. I don't listen to him very often but everytime I listen to them they bring me back to the good old DIY-times when everything was possible and we had open ears for different  sounds.

Twanging Tuesday # 88

This series will come to an end in a few weeks and it's hard to find new twanging sounds. But there are a lot of songs that could be played in this context. This one is a song by The Milkshakes, a side-project by Billy Childish where he lived his obsession in rockabilly and twanging sounds. It's a song that is one of my companions throughout the last decades. I always enjoy when I listen to it because it is simple, grounded and true.

The Milkshakes - Ambassadors Of Love

Low-Fi

Yesterday The Swede featured the superb low-fi songs of Birds of Hell that made me remind to another artist that was close to this kind of music. Billy Childish is one of these artists that plays his kind of music for long long years. Making less compromises in his way of music. Listening to Birds of Hell I came back to a collaboration Billy Childish did a few years ago with Holly Golightly. It's good to hear these songs again and not a too bad start into the new week.

And this is another song by Holly that I've almost forgotten.

Chatham Girls

It's just another lazy day on the beach after we had a spontanous party yesterday. Nothing more to do than to reed some novels I wanted to read since several weeks or to hang around with the staff of my favourite beachbar. They told me a few more words in their language so that I am not only used to look out for someone who is able to speak English. It is 3 p.m. and I decided to have another beer while I write this post. Fantastic to sit here in the shade getting cooled by a refreshing breeze from the sea watching the blue and green water and listening to the sound of the waves. That is what I call recreation and it will get me the power to manage the things that Ihave to do in the next n´months.

Today's song comes from The Singing Loins another underrated band from the 90s. But our old hero Billy Childish had more than one ear for them. If you want to know how they sound - here's a short excerpt from their homepage:

The Loins' song writing was steeped in the British & European traditions of Punk, Folk, Music Hall, Character, Chorus, Cabaret, Melodrama & Buffoonery. Singing tales of underdogs, suicides, circus freaks, the bereaved, frustrated and heart-broken, the washed up and mentally ill. Ever enduring outsiders, it’s likely they were the world’s longest serving, truly amateur, original musical group. They were certainly the fucking best.
Now the history lesson....Brod and Arf started The Loins as a raw, stripped down acoustic duo in 1990 and soon had Medway legend Billy Childish in their corner. He recorded their first two albums live in his bathroom onto a mono Revox tape machine and released them on his Hangman label. These savage rarities are now swapping hands for big dollars on EBay and are often quoted as major influences by young purveyors of punk/folk.
After a couple more self-released albums and a great album with Billy Childish called ‘At The Bridge’ they split in 1999. After a 6 year lay-off they shook hands and returned in 2005 with a triumphant comeback album, ‘Songs To Hear Before You Die’, and the same year were joined by Rob Shepherd, who played junk shop banjo and mandolin on their 2007 album, ’The Drowned Man Resuscitator’. Johnny Bass then joined the party on 2009's 'Unravelling England', 2011's 'Stuff' and 2012's '...here on earth'. 

The Singing Loins - Chatham Girls