Doc Bowling
(guitar & vocals), Donnie Burke (guitar, baritone guitar, banjo &
backing vocals), Simon Minney (bass, acoustic bass, whistle & backing
vocals), Graham Hadley (drums & backing vocals), Roger Champion (percussion
& backing vocals), Sophie Loyer (violin), Lawrence Davies (harmonica) &
Eddie Kulak (keyboards)
(Review by Russell)
A new name to your reviewer, Doc Bowling is a new
favourite. Doc and his fellow seven ‘blues professors’ can be pigeon-holed
quite easily – providing you have a vacant dozen or more pigeon holes! Alt
country, blues (twelve bar and its variants), Americana, rock-a-billy,
shuffling bottleneck, ska – all from an oblique (psychotherapist’s) view point
and a Stetson brim-full of humour and understated musical excellence.
Doc Bowling sings on all eleven tracks on Black Country Boy. The eponymous first
track identifies Doc Bowling as a lad raised in the West Midlands:
Smethwick Town to Langley
Green
Rowley Regis!
Old Hill to Cradley Heath
From Lye down
To Stourbridge Town
The remarkably prescient Fal$e Prophit Blues is right on the money:
Draw a picture of the
Prophet,
You’re shot dead on sight
A politically aware band making a statement! It’s a
change from the current vogue for bands making a quasi-intellectual pitch for
their brand of ‘original composition.’
The musicianship isn’t in any way secondary to the lyric content; Eddie
Kulak (keys) and Lawrence Davies (harmonica) feature. Existential Blues is heavy stuff. Don’t worry, read the
liner-notes…A guitar and harmonica-driven
up-tempo twelve-bar blues. That’ll do.
Pedestrian Crossroad Blues borrows from Robert Johnson. Slide guitar
from Donnie Burke and fiddle from Sophie Loyer despairing of ‘the deadly and deplorable state of England’s
pedestrian crossings’ is unabashed blues with lyrics not of 1930s America,
but of twenty first century concerns:
You say you’ve got road rage
What we need is road peace!
These vehicular road-wars,
They’ve just gotta cease
The spitting out of Ve-hic-u-lar has to be heard. Almost as good as the classic I was born in 19 and 42 (wailing Chicago
harp ‘n’ all).
Biodiesel Blues poses the question:
Must the poor go hungry
Just so the rich can drive?
Growing corn for diesel
Will the earth survive?!
The CD cover image Pastorale
(detail) is by Claire Spencer
courtesy Bridgeman Images.
One could be tempted to vote for a Green candidate at
the forthcoming General Election!
Back to the music – and it is about the music – Church
Going Blues, great lyrics:
My man Muddy Waters
He brought me the news
You gotta go to choich
If you want to sing the blues
A lyric with choich
in it makes Black Country Blues a
‘must have’ purchase.
Black Country Boy by Doc Bowling
and his Blues Professors is available now. The band’s CD launch is on
Friday 20 March at King’s College London Students’ Union.
Russell
Russell
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