Kevin Coyne
From anarchic art school bluesman to kind-eyed troubadour. By Andrew Collins.
“He gigged constantly and welcomed a chair when the nights took their toll.”
NOT ENOUGH of us lie awake wondering what Tom Waits would have sounded like had he been raised not in Pomona, California, but Derby, in Derbyshire. The answer is rattlebag bluesman Kevin Coyne, whose discography runs – by his own count – to “just under 40” albums, including live recordings between 1969 and his death at 60 from lung fibrosis in 2004, having relocated to Nuremberg where he nourished his fine art in a city that also accepted him for his blues.
Hailed by Rolling Stone as “peculiar… even by relaxed standards”, Coyne never imitated his heroes Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, preferring the warmly parochial improvisational cabaret that suited his German bolthole. From paint-caked fingernails to qualifications as a counsellor, he broke with blues band Siren and went solo via John Peel’s Dandelion imprint. Our volubly pale-faced improviser learned free expression at
CAST YOUR VOTESÉ
This month you chose your Top 10 Kevin Coyne LPs. Next month we want your Diana Ross Top 10 (solo and Supremes). Send selections via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Diana Ross’; we’ll print the best comments. art school and – an early beneficiary of Richard Branson’s largesse – finessed himself into a bluff, hairy, kind-eyed troubadour.
Peak Coyne came with 1978 album
namechecking the punks (“I’m rattlin’ my bones, I’m pogo-ing!”) and throatily giggling his way to irresistible if brief relevance. That he mocked Branson on the mordant Having A Party (“fools in fools’ hats … discussing my future”) made him daringly anarchic. Magpies have much to divine from the CV of this “anti-star” (a description from Virgin pressnotes) who gigged constantly and welcomed a chair when the nights took their toll, postbreakdown. Growing into a rotund, white-mopped Joe Cocker figure and cool dad, he tugs on his roots and distils pure East Midlands at the end of with the twangy order, “Git owt-uv-it!” After all that, he dedicated the title track to Sid Vicious.
You say: “Marlene, House On The Hill, Eastbourne Ladies and Talking To No One all got me into his music,” Al Cane, Facebook
This mega-confident 22-track, Manor-born double coins a boldly narrative new Coyne. He opens the set judiciously a cappella, closer to beat poetry than rock, that singular blues voice precisely as the Derbyshire twang intended. He holds room and nerve with a description of neighbour Marjory, whom he humorously warbles will “sort out all of my nasty neighbours”. Band arrangements are augmented by tuba, congas and mandolin, while Coyne mixes daft live favourite Chicken Wing with flamenco-flavoured Dog Latin, in which his master’s voice speaks in canine tongues. Are those memories of a Catholic childhood peering through the silliness?