Features Disc of the day
Earl Brutus
Tonight You Are The Special One
(Fruition/Island, 1998)
The art-glam, prog-punk, drunk-and-disorderly sound of a Britain about to crash and burn.
Earl Brutus had a thing for former Daily Express astrologer Justin Toper - at one point planning to turn his medieval-looking visage into a glowing-eyed stage spectacle somewhere between Donington Monsters Of Rock and Saturday night TV. Brutus were a bit clairvoyant themselves, muddled seers-on-the-beer who saw Broken Britain even in the Cool Britannia of 1998. Their depiction of useless celebrity, brute hedonism and anger-for-its-own-sake was both hilarious and moving, assembled over a brilliant mêlée of glam beats, progressive rock, electronics and power chords, via full-throated consciousness-stream lyrics. Anglo-Japanese, mostly 30-something provocateurs active from 1993, the band were big on rage and remorse, smarts and irrationality - a slogan ran 'Pop Music Is Wasted On The Young' - and their second album was in no mood to shirk. It's a purgative best taken when feeling irritated and depressed by modern culture, mortality and theme pubs. It's hard to say exactly why, but the CD booklet's images of a slipper, an inhaler, a cup of tea and a chip on a plastic fork definitely relate to this. That's not to say confusion of a deliberately pursued sort does not also reign; what is The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It (the name comes from a VHS owned by frontman Nick Sanderson, which featured Mick Ronson footage juxtaposed with the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy)? Why is there a Lindisfarne reference on Come Taste My Mind? Who is the relieved sex change case depicted in East (a bastardised version of the GDR national anthem), who has the crucial operation in London before heading back to Poland? But this is not a place to seek answers. Instead, calm yourself with the album's elegiac qualities, like Let Me Be Kind's poetic reflection "the pylons stretched for miles" (the shortness of life, time and lamenting the industrial past in one go!), grinding dirge Male Wife ending with Sanderson forgetting the words to God Save The Queen, or the poignancy in the peak-Bowie-careering-down-a-steep-hill-in-a-shopping trolley howl of 99p; "Will you talk to me for a fiver? 'Cos I'm English and you hate me... Beat me up so softly." As it was, Earl Brutus's dreams of mega stardom were not to be realised, but their mighty works remain. Pop Music Is still Wasted On The Young. And remember the great Nick Sanderson, who died one year ago today.
Ian Harrison (with thanks to Roy Wilkinson)
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 08/06/2009
Further Listening
Earl Brutus – Your Majesty… We Are Here (Deceptive, 1996)
The Fall – The Infotainment Scan (Permanent, 1993)
Denim – Back In Denim (Boy’s Own/London, 1992)
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