This Mogul Coil
Dublin gospel roots music? Bloody hell – is somebody remaking The Commitments? No, it’s sublime newcomers The Last Tycoons.
Peter Murphy, 21 Apr 2010
“We used to rehearse in an industrial estate off Sheriff Street,” recalls Last Tycoons frontman Stephen Fanning in a coffee shop in his native Dun Laoghaire. “There was an African church in one of the units, and you’d wander in on a Sunday, and it was weird to hear all these African people going crazy and chanting back and forth in the North Side of Dublin.”
Here’s the metaphor we were looking for: an integration of gospel roots music with urban Dublinia. Which is pretty much the gist of the Last Tycoons’ excellent eponymous debut album.
Slovenly rather than sloppy, The Last Tycoons is a cavalier party of Stonesy electric blues, Poguesy bacchanalia and that old-timey Band-like hootenanny vibe. Halfway between the Harry Smith Anthology and the band’s mucker the Mighty Stef, these songs exist in a speculative historical loop where Ireland has been annexed to the southern states of the USA. Not a million miles from the scene in I’m Not There where Jim James and the boys from Calexico do ‘Going To Acapulco’.
“My dad (Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning) is a big muso, and from a very young age I’ve been hearing jazz and old blues, Leadbelly, even stuff like Lonnie Donegan,” recalls Stephen. “And when I was in my teens I got into a lot of Appalachian stuff, the Carter Family. I think when you hear the quality of the old recordings, they don’t jump out at people the way a modern recording does, but I was used to hearing scratchy old jazz records, Bessie Smith and stuff, so it didn’t seem like such a struggle to get past it and hear what was actually there. There’s amazing melody and stories in that music. It’s amazing, I got the Harry Smith Anthology and was listening to that song ‘Drunkard’s Special’, which is word for word the Dubliners’ ‘Seven Drunken Nights’.”
Which mightn’t be as 21st Century Anomalous as it sounds. The Stones at the height of their pop stardom were playing faithful interpretations of 60-year-old bluesmen’s music and selling it to the kids. The White Stripes and Kings of Leon have pulled off similar feats over the last decade.
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