WRECKLESS ERIC:
A DYSFUNCTIONAL SUCCESS
Gig Review of:
WRECKLESS ERIC
at ‘Bradford Alternative Cabaret'
Wreckless Eric (aka Eric Goulden) spawned an oddball hit – “(I’d Go The) Whole Wide World” (a highly collectible Stiff BUY16, August), as unique a taster for 1977 as anything from the Pistols/Clash/Damned triumvirate. He does it tonight. Its escalating tensions rise from low insidious strum to shattered flash-walls of power, manipulating splinters of light and shade (in muso-speak) – but giving every impression of total spontaneity in his hands. It blueprints his set from “Swimming Against The Tide Of Reason”, about a suicide pact, through “Young Upwardly-Mobile & Stupid” (both from his 1986 ‘Len Bright Combo’ guise), and even into the brief rhyme “She Destroyed Me Fuck By Fuck” (from ‘Le Beat Electrique’ in September 1989).
Judy Radul, a Canadian poet with William Burroughs credentials and fantasy gardens of sexual politics opens the show. She neatly contrasts Eric’s obsessively English eccentricities – Eric’s “Final Taxi” has a bleak black-humerous Morrissey-Northerness while “Semaphore Signals” (original ‘B’-side of “Whole Wide World”) recalls Ray Davies’ ‘Terry meets Julie’ hard urban romance. There’s pack-a-snack and supermarket checkout girls in quirkily affectionate mock-ups of tacky seaside resorts, cheap TV ‘Comedy Time’ dross, and dead Soap stars. ‘They won’t let me sing that one with my band. They say it’s wet. If you agree you can chuck glasses at me, or summat…’ No-one chucks even a beer-mat…
‘WRECKLESS ERIC’ (Repertoire RR4217) thirteen quirky masterpieces on a CD reissue of his debut Stiff LP, with bonus tracks – includes ‘Reconnez Cherie’, ‘Rags & Tatters’, ‘Waxworks’, ‘Telephoning Home’, ‘Grown Ups’, ‘Whole Wide World’, ‘Rough Kids’, ‘Personal Hygiene’, ‘Brain Thieves’, ‘There Isn’t Anything Else’, ‘Semaphore Signals’, ‘Be Stiff’, ‘Be Stiff (Take 2)’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=graU-CEfgeM&feature=fvwrel
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