Album Review: Knats – A Great Day in Newcastle (Gearbox)

Cooper Robson (vocals); Stanley Elvis Woodward/King David Ike-Elechi/Ferg Kilsby (vocals) (track 9); Stanley Elvis Woodward (bass guitar/synths); King David Ike-Elechi (drums/percussion); Ferg Kilsby (Trumpet, flugelhorn); Sandro Shargarodsky (piano, keyboards, synthesiser); George Johnson (tenor saxophone); Otto Kampa (alto saxophone); Tom Ford (guitar); Geordie Greep (guitar) (tracks 4 and 7); Josh Mitchell-Rayner (piano) (track 1); Viviane Ghiglino (flute) (track 1); Lucy Rowan (alto flute) (track 1); Frank Barr (clarinet) (track 1); Sebastian Barley (French horn) (track 1); Tobias Amadio (trumpet) (track 1); Bertie Beaman (trombone) (track 1); Dillon Pinder (trombone) (track 9); Enya Barber (violin); Congling Wu (violin); Natalia Solis Paredes (viola); Morgan Key (cello)

There’s a wonderful Northern defiance that runs through much of this album like a steel rod. It’s two fingers up to the South and advice to tell them that they can stick their ingrained entitlement and belief in their superiority where the sun don’t shine. (Ironic suggestion, I know, in the middle of a heatwave).

It ranges from big boots on the ground, declaimed poetry, through rapid-fire punk rock to jazz-rock, some blues-soul and an occasional sweeping elegance that all holds together because these are all constituent parts of their portrait of the North. Heresy, I know, but it reminds me of Ezra Collective in the way that Knats have incorporated their roots into the music, meanwhile, the imagery in Cooper Robson’s poems add enormous strength to anchoring the group into the local soil.

Opener, 7 Bridges To Burn is one of Robson’s poems over bold, beautifully arranged, sweeping strings and warm brass and woodwinds. Images from local geography and 200 years of social and political history and of sporting life emerge from the gentle music. The tight focus on one broken character moves to the hopes and dreams of a new generation with “7 bridges to burn” which in turn soars over a historical sweep from “Romans… to Roundheads to Reivers,…Ship workers to Shearer…Pit ponies turned coal dolies” with equal contempt for Thatcher and Ashley. It’s all of Kynren in 40 lines and is quite an achievement.

Gainsborough Grove/Wor Jackie follows. The Grove in question sounds posher than it is, as it’s up Arthur’s Hill in Fenham. Brass fired prog that flows into pure soul and back out again via a rich voiced tenor and into a spiralling bass solo with simple themes that rise above the proggy breakdown. Wor Jackie is a paean to those men physically broken by heavy industry and the pits with ferocious screams and wailing souls; it’s violent and dramatic. Lyrically, it’s a second cousin to Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding from the time of the Falklands War. Messy-In is more chilled and reflective to open with a complex bassline decorated with electric piano and a lovely trumpet solo before the pure 70s soulful jazz funk of Azure Blues; all grooves with a furious, expansive bass solo, insistent drums, pulsing piano and it all seems to hang off a single chiming cowbell. It’s one for white suits on the Tuxedo Princess and is to be played loud. It closes with a gentle, reflective, early dawn, mellow, home stretch.

Bigg Market Scrappa is all angles and punches in the music to capture the lyrical sketch of the aforementioned Scrappa who ends with his “Head spinning like the donner in the window pane.” Carpet Doctor opens as a story blues, its subtlety undermined by a driving pulsing bass line before it explodes into something bolder. The Doctor of the title is another ex-prisoner trying to make his way in the world in the face of general mistrust. He’s carried along by music that is equal parts jazz and splenetic punk rock fury that reminded me of The Ruts, more than any others, with a scything guitar struggling to rise above the melee. There is defiance in the lyric as the man struggles his way through, but he is, he states “not the caterpillar, I am the butterfly” though the sheer heft of the music does serve to undermine the delicacy of the butterfly metaphor as a furious musical pile on forces the voice forward just to be heard. Never Gonna Be A Boxer is a nice piece of solid rolling jazz funk with soaring brass, some 70s squelching synth and a probing bass, all sharp turns and minor excursions around the main theme, a groove that really digs in.

There is melancholy aplenty in closing lament, Farewell Johnny Miner, which features Kilsby’s excellent trumpet playing as part of a rich, rounded, full voiced arrangement. For those of us who are old enough, it’s another reminder of the Miners’ Strike of the mid 80s and the opportunity to consider whether to get our hopes up as the King of The North waits to be crowned. I suspect that many of us are thinking NOT.

The question has been raised of whether this very North East centric music will travel and I hope that it will. The voice and the words are stridently defiant but far from incomprehensible and, it’s just a small revenge for having to put up with Chas & Dave in the 70s. More importantly, it’s a musically and lyrically powerful album, made with passion and commitment, defiantly and, more importantly, proudly, northern.

Dave Sayer