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Excusez-Moi! is the splendid result, an encapsulation of southern-English folk blues ragtime skiffle with a soup-can of New Orleans horns. Stewart Carr (vocals, guitar), David Jordan (vocals, double bass, guitar) and Lesley Carr (vocals, percussion, harmonica) met with musician/producer Mike West and various New Orleans-based musicians including Slim Nelson (blues harp), Craig Klein (trombone, tuba) and Myshkin (harmony vocals). The songs, all of them written by the Hot Tamales, range from camp through satire to serious. Some are straightforward and, solid, as good as I've ever heard. The ability of the Hot Tamales to write catchy choruses may have you singing along, a temporary Hampshire Tamale yourself. "Melancholic Millionaire" and "Life's Too Short" put me the most in mind of the early Bonzos, the period of their classic "Tubas in the Moonlight," but the Hot Tamales are more good-natured than the Bonzos ever were. "Life's Too Short" is a slaphappy paean to living in the moment.
Of course, judging from the musical accompaniment and chord
progression, living in the past is just what singer David Jordan
is doing; despite the 1950s references, he sounds as happy as
a London man-about-town some champagne-sodden day in 1933, who
has a dance band with trombone and banjo handy. People go crazy - the Man in the Van Besides the imaginary dance halls of the Jazz Age, the Hot Tamales also come from the folk music circuit and can perform homilies that aren't quite what they pretend to be. "Old Time Religion" isn't really a revivalist hymn: Give me that Old Time Religion And despite its prayerful, earnest chorus, "Keep Me on the Path" is sly, not sincere. Keep me on the path, Keep me on the path, David Jordan's task at hand turns out to be putting his feet up, drinking beer, and telling corny jokes. And I wouldn't take Stewart Carr's injunction to lead a simple life too seriously. Should have led the simple life Most of the songs on Excusez-Moi! either escape or mock their genres. "Mary Ellen," though, seems to come from nowhere. It's a melancholy song played with a bowed bass, harmonica, acoustic guitar and what the Hot Tamales rightly call "beautiful harmonies" sung by Myshkin. Mary Ellen, caught the young boy's eye, Mary Ellen caught the young boy's heart Mary Ellen is as fine as she can be Mary Ellen passed the young boy by It seems half traditional ballad and half broken narrative. There's a story here, one we all recognize, even though what exactly happened abides as a mystery. The cd's closing song, "Sun in the Sky," is every bit as beautiful. If I had to pick the song that concentrates all the complexities of the Hot Tamales' songwriting, it'd be the cd's opener. Driven by a jew's harp, "Man in Black" is a perky, sinister tune. Ho ho I'm the man in black, This fellow just can't quite make himself as menacing as Dylan's man in a long black coat or the Rolling Stones's "man of wealth and taste." (It may be the Jew's harp. You'll notice that grand opera makes little use of Jew's harps.) Of course he could be Johnny Cash but I'd bet on Roy Orbison with his black stage outfits and trademark dark glasses. The most amazing lyric in this whole amazing collection of songs occurs in "Man in Black." I wear dark glasses so you don't see Who, what, and how is this grasshopper? The lone survivor of a plague of locusts? Have these Hampshire cats been reading Hawthorne? "Why do you tremble at me alone?" cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. "Tremble also at each others Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crepe so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil." Black veils, grasshoppers, dark glasses-well, maybe it's just Roy Orbison, a man who had every reason to feel eaten up inside. There's one more man in black visiting Hampshire-Jimmy Reed. The Hot Tamales describe their song "Jimmy Reed" as "a simple tribute to the man, key of E." "We think he'd have liked it." Mr Tuxedo from Chicago Not only did Jimmy Reed have that "lazy sound," "Jimmy Reed" has it too. Slim Nelson captures Reed's harp sound precisely. The Hot Tamales played one gig in New Orleans, went back home--I
don't know if anybody followed them up the gangplank--and left
behind Excusez-Moi! Buy it. It sounds good. It'll make
you happy. It may make you think. And if you get to Hampshire
and see them in person, tell me if any of them look like Nick
LaRocca. You can visit the on line at www.tamales.co.uk. |
In March 1919, New Orleans' Original
Dixieland Jazz Band landed in Liverpool and soon began a stint
at the London Palladium. The band stayed in England about a year
and a half. Its leader Nick LaRocca was very popular among the
ladies; one member of the gentry was said to have actually tried
to follow him up the gangplank to board the ship that took the
band back to America. Perhaps the ODJB left some musical influences
behind in the south of England; perhaps they left some genetic
material as well. In the 1940s, maybe George Formby and his little
ukulele contributed to the mixture. In the 1950s, Lonnie Donnegan,
a Glaswegian channeling Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Lonnie
Johnson, must have brought skiffle not just to Liverpool but
to Hampshire. In the 1960s the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band might have
made a visit. In any case, in 2001 Shedfield, Hampshire, retaliated
for the ODJB's 1919 invasion and struck back-the Hot Tamales
came to record in New Orleans.
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