KEVIN COYNE PRESS

KEVIN COYNE

UNDERGROUND

TURPENTINE RECORDS

The recording sessions for Underground were completed in Nuremberg two months before Kevin Coyne’s death in December 2004. By then advanced pulmonary fibrosis had left the singer wheelchair-bound and hooked up to an oxygen supply. Terrible circumstances to live with, let alone write and record an album. But this CD doesn’t give you a great talent in decline. Far from it.

With Underground, Coyne has produced an album that isn’t merely good considering the circumstances, it’s a great collection of songs whichever way you choose to measure it. And the fact that he could – through his music – transcend his physical circumstances is extraordinary. His voice was still in great shape too, more so than anyone - his doctors included - could have reasonably expected. It’s difficult at times like this to avoid sounding trite or glib. Suffice it to say that we all want to leave our mark, but few musicians have given us a swansong as vital as this.

This, then, is the final chapter in a series of 30-odd albums recorded by Coyne since the late 60s, beginning with his work as lead vocalist in Siren. He soon became a firm favourite of John Peel – the group recorded for the DJ’s Dandelion label – and was acclaimed by many as one of the great white blues singers. Importantly, Coyne stood apart from his blues boom peers who, though undoubtedly sincere, often ended up delivering an ersatz version of a black American culture that was way outside their own terms of reference.

As a solo artist particularly, Coyne produced something original and quite different: genuine, raw, unalloyed British blues true to his Derbyshire roots. He articulated the laughter and misery, the hopes and dreams, the idiosyncrasies and foibles of the people he saw around him. This was the blues of workaday life, of oddballs and outsiders, of square pegs trying hard to fit in. It was all presented in unflinching detail and with an untrammelled force that made it harrowing at times, but it came with a great generosity of spirit – and an absurdist humour – that was also a characteristic of his published prose. Coyne wrote with a non-judgemental empathy, allowing the subjects of his songs to simply be who they really were – himself included.

This trademark style is found throughout Underground. On the exuberant, gritty R&B tune “Hard And Loud”, Coyne’s voice and acoustic guitar is backed with aplomb by his regular band: Andreas Blüml on guitar; Harry Hirschmann on bass; and Werner Steinhauser on drums (although Coyne’s guitarist son Robert is absent this time around). The largely acoustic “Silence Silence” is another empathetic group performance. Here the song’s protagonist is in a desperate state of love and confusion, but when looking at himself in the mirror, he gets some sage advice in affairs of the heart from a mysterious figure he sees standing next to him.

It was illuminating – though not entirely surprising – to learn recently that Coyne had always harboured a desire to be a stand-up comedian. On “Low I Try”, his asides feel like a comic’s patter as he takes the audience into his confidence, softening them up before delivering the punchline. The title track could hardly be more different. One of Coyne’s very best songs, it finds him in tremendous voice, but the sentiment of the lyrics is inescapable. Over a loping, low key backing, Coyne rages against the dying of the light, then seems to accept it – embrace it, even – in the final “I’m not goin’ anywhere, I’m goin’ home, I’m goin’ home”. Then it peters out into silence.

Down the years, the enthusiasm of musicians to sing about their offspring has often caused embarrassment among those not so intimately acquainted with the song’s subject. But the closing track on Underground, “Baby Billy” – which Coyne addresses to his young grandson – is a beautiful letter-in-song from a man to a child barely old enough to be able to remember him, written in the recognition that as one cycle ends another begins. As always, Coyne tells it exactly like it is; the song’s strength is that it’s extraordinarily poignant, but comes without a trace of mawkishness. And it’s difficult – impossible, actually – to think of another artist who could have pulled that one off.

MIKE BARNES

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