So I Threw A Stone

So I will wrap up my impromptu miniseries posting on female artists here with a slightly ambiguous one, Thee Headcoatees Here Comes Cessation; the band’s 1999 swansong.

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In the spirit of the band who hit upon the cunning wheeze of releasing exactly the same track twice, albeit with slightly different lyrics AND mentioning the fact in the second song’s intro*, this review will involve wholesale theft from an earlier review of their Sisters Of Suave LP.

Thee Headcoatees at the time of Here Comes Cessation were Ludella Black, Holly Golightly and Kyra LaRubia**. Now I am a little unclear as to whether they played on the LP as they are listed only on the sleeve, whereas on previous LPs the band are listed as Billy Childish, Bruce Brand and Johnny Johnson (Thee Headcoats) – I know the ladies can play, but did they? anyway as you can see the sinister Svengali-type figure of Billy Childish lurks in the background, which is all very understandable when you know your history.

You could spend your lifetime and your children’s children’s inheritance cataloguing and buying even a quarter of Billy Childish’s 100+ LP releases over the last 36 years, I’m currently hovering around the 17 LPs, 9 singles and one lithograph mark and want more.  How to describe this poet, renowned painter, provocateur and guitarist? beyond the scope of this piece I’m afraid. 

Basically I’ll plump for the fact that Billy Childish lives mostly, but not solely, in a foxhole on the border of early 1976 British punk and the maximum R&B of the Who and the earlier primitivism of garage rockers like The Sonics. It makes perfect sense when you think of it because it is precisely that rough-arsed R&B that the early punks sped-up and thrashed and fleshed out for their sound in general; think Sex Pistols ‘Substitute’ and ‘Don’t Gimme No Lip Child’, amongst a golden host of others.

Around about this time his band were Thee Headcoats, Thee Headcoatees (previously The Delmonas) were their mates who’d do a few songs on stage then graduated to supporting them.  Recordings inevitably followed.

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Here Comes Cessation was Thee Headcoatees sign off in 1999, released on Vinyl Japan. There are twelve tracks penned by a certain Mr B Childish and two Bo Diddley covers.

As always there is a low-fi/high voltage crackle to proceedings and whilst it is true that a few of the tracks do blur into one another in the recollection, particularly on the second side, there are some real flash grenades here.

I have a particular yen for the fleet-footed sprechgesang of ‘All Night Long’ with its tales of small town scrapping and diving; ‘I saw somebody laugh at me so I threw a stone’. It comes on like the theme tune to a 1964 grim British kitchen sink detective yarn set in a drab provincial town, with added guitar bite. Yummy.

Best of all is ‘Hurt Me’, a brilliantly sung song with all the right chords and vocal harmonies in all the right places. I like the way the protagonist veers from calling her lover’s face cold, to being ‘lovely to behold’. I take tentative issue with the whole ‘come on and hurt me’ thang, but ladies get to be as fucked up, self-defeating and inconsistent as the rest of us chromosomally-deficient rejects. This really is quite a brilliant cut, literally.

The hits keep on a’striking with the strident, sexy, assertive ‘An Image Of You’ which is punkier than most and conjures up visions of all manner of insalubrious acts occurring in a grimy seaside guesthouse. That might just me though.

The murky, insistent ‘Help Out’ is superb, the kind of swampy 60’s wig-out that never happened at the time because folks weren’t cool enough yet. It really made me want to frug disconsolately^. The cover of ‘Road Runner’ in contrast is a motorin’ blast and I am very taken by the(e) various Headcoatees’ ‘beep-beeps’.

The LP title track is sung in French, which always sounds immeasurably cool on an LP of otherwise English songs – the word ‘cessation’ it turns out is a belter in that language.

I would also highly commend ‘You’re Gonna Get What’s Coming’ to you^^, which is a truly menacing R&B reckoning down a back street that speeds up and slows down as and when it damn well chooses – screw you and your tempos, buster!

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So after cessation what’s left? well nothing for Thee Headcoatees as it happened, although you could tie your musical sleuthing glands into knots tracking down what everyone here did next.

Let’s face it there was a built-in obsolescence wired into the very concept of this band, especially when it was tethered to one as mercurial as Mr Childish. I really liked Thee Headcoatees though, they threw some real measures of light and shade into the formula, very much putting the ‘and’ into the R&B. There are flashes of real feeling and depth here and there, their female voices lighting up this maximum R&B no man’s land like a flare.

Here Comes Cessation, there thee Headcoatees went. The end.

1242 Down.

*’Davey Crockett’ and ‘Santa Claus’:

**sadly the wonderfully monikered Bongo Debbie had left the previous year.

^you ever try frugging disconsolately? it isn’t as easy as one might imagine. My first three tries just evoked Saturday night in the spinal ward but persistence won out eventually.

^^see what I did there?