The Burning Hell - Wait Till You Hear This One

Storytelling songs rarely combine a great tune with a great story.  Often they fail on both counts.  Who hasn’t walked into a store on Christmas Eve and immediately headed straight back out after detecting Chris de Burgh's mawkishly execrable 'A Spaceman Came Travelling' piping out of the speakers?  If that's any indication of the second coming, do wait until I'm not around.  Sometimes you get a terrible story but a great tune.  Thin Lizzy's 'Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed' is a tawdry tale of a dodgy drug deal.  But listen to those drums and Phil Lynott's raspy vocals and Scott Gorham's lead guitar, and it's a case of who cares if the narrative isn't about to snare a Pulitzer.  Certainly not the coach-loads of rappers who have sampled that drum-riff. 

And then there are those that get it spectacularly right.  Great music, fantastic story.  The Canadian band The Burning Hell are one such example.  Utterly beguiled by their recorded output, and hearing Twitter tales of their wonderful live prowess (thank you, Lesley and Spela), last night I headed out to The Lexington pub on the Pentonville Road and got to see and hear what all the fuss was about. 

Any album called Public Library is alright by me!

First of all, most of you are almost certainly uninitiated.  If this is the case, fire up your headphones and take a listen to 'Fuck the Government'.  Rather than the angry political rant that this title hints at, you are probably finding yourselves utterly wrong-footed and listening to a genuinely touching and incredibly funny love song about a couple getting together at a party.  

[Mathias] We met at the New Year’s party of my vegetarian friend.

[Ariel] I said I was studying English.

[Mathias] I told you I was in a band.

[Ariel]  I asked what the band was called.

[Mathias] I said it’s called The Burning Hell.

[Ariel] I said I’ve never heard of you.

[Mathias] I said that’s probably just as well.

[Mathias] Just to make conversation I told you about a dream I had in which Jean Baudrillard was rapping with Public Enemy shouting “Don’t believe the hyperreal” with Flava Flav and Chuck D.

[Ariel] And I said I think we might have a lot in common then, possibly, because I’m also a musician, and also a student of hip-hop-posophy!

Although, all of this does make me think that I never go to the right parties.  Anyway, no need to read the lyrics, just listen to the song and luxuriate in the gloriously drunken chorus. 

The Burning Hell live are, indeed, mind-blowingly good.  Mathias Kom's vocals and by turns raucous and then mesmerising guitar playing, Ariel Sharratt's life-affirming drumming and mournfully beautiful forays on the bass-clarinet, and Darren Browne's - actually, aside from the bass, I don't have a clue about some of the instruments that Darren was brilliantly playing – are a joy to behold.  That Ariel and Mathias would occasionally swap instruments and take over lead-vocals mid-song only added to the fun.  And fun - an undervalued commodity at a gig - was definitely being had.  If all their performances have them smiling, laughing and displaying the kind of warmth exuded last night, then sign me up for their next visit to London. 

'Love songs are dumb!' ... 'Oh yeah, wait till you hear these ones!' Thanks to @Chops_Top_Fives for the photograph 

Other than 'Fuck The Government' which turned into a joyously secular hymn as the audience roared out the chorus, and the encore that had a charming cover of Mick & Sylvia's 'Love is Strange' segueing into 'Amateur Rappers', a song that is home to the best Knock-knock joke ever, my own highlight was 'Canadian Wine'.  If you are every contemplating crashing a wedding, here is the drunken blueprint.  Incidentally, it's becoming quite clear that many of The Burning Hell's songs contain copious amounts of boozing.  Like the narrator of that song, my limit is also five, and I should never dare drink seven.  I definitely don't go to the right weddings. 

A few songs that I would have loved to have heard live were missed.  One of these, 'Men Without Hats', is an absolute cracker, a song about that coming of age moment when you fall in love with music, or rather the first time that you sense the amount of joy that you are about to have discovering your own music.  For Mathias it happened one Saturday.  He'd finished watching cartoons and had headed straight down to the mall …

I made straight for the tape store

I knew exactly what to look for

I skipped the candy shop and the clown with the animal balloons

I saw it on the rack with the other new tapes

That baby face with the gap-tooth gape

And I grabbed one quick like a pervert in a video store.

A copy of Pop Goes the World by Men Without Hats is purchased. Curiously, I'm now thinking of my own musical Damascene moment and it happened in the summer of 1981 in Rhyl, North Wales, standing alongside my dad as he thumbed through the LPs in a bargain bin outside of seafront shop that also sold buckets and spades and multi-coloured, mini-fluttering windmills.  The record he decided on was the already remarked upon Thin Lizzy's Johnny The Fox.  The title and the cover reeled me in. Nearly twelve, I couldn’t wait to listen and learn all about what that fox got up to (I was not particularly impressed and it took me an age to appreciate those drums).  Nevertheless, I'm quite sure that it was only a few months later that I made my own way to the record store at the entrance to the Makinson Arcade in Wigan, and made my first pocket-moneyed purchase.  Duran Duran’s 'Hungry Like the Wolf' in case you're wondering.

Wigan's Makinson Arcade - It wasn't a Virgin in 1982. It might have been an Our Price, but I'm not sure.  It's now probably a pie shop!

What a wonderful night, then, spent in the company of the finest storytelling band bar none.   Not even the minor embarrassment of arriving half an hour before the doors opened and insisting, with a prickly annoyance to the kindly bearded Canadian on the door, that 'my email definitely says 7.30' could spoil it.  That kindly bearded Canadian was, of course, Mathias.  Please accept my apologies, Mathias, and thanks to you, Ariel and Darren for such an amazing night.  


Postscript: 

I still clearly have many a gap to fill in on The Burning Hell.  Twitter friend Lesley asked if they played 'Eugene & Maurice' last night.  I'd never even come across this song.  After listening, though, it's now a firm favourite, a wonderfully bitter-sweet tale about Where The Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak and his lover Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst.  

Maurice Sendak and Eugene Glynn

Maurice never felt that he could tell his parents about his relationship: "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy.  They never, never, never knew."  The Burning Hell song is a gently poignant eulogy to that fifty year relationship.