A casual pre-concert chinwag with Robert Lloyd as he lounges around the Nightingales merchandise table (FYI, assorted gifts include “Bullet for Gove” t-shirts, copies of Only My Opinion, Volume I of the Lloyd’s collected lyrics, a bright orange cloth bag and a designer glasses case!), was an intriguing start to a rare evening in the company of Britain’s (still) most underrated band. A chatty Lloyd confirmed that the next set would consist mostly of newer material, including half a dozen unrecorded numbers (I confess my heart almost sank to the bottom of the Taff at this point, as I was hoping against hope for a big tour through the band’s catalog). In truth, that was never going to happen and Lloyd was quick to explain why he didn’t want to end up running his own Nightingales tribute band, citing how he once turned down comedian Stewart Lee’s offer of a high-profile festival. slot that was conditional on the band playing their debut album Pig’s on Purpose (1982) in its entirety. Lloyd kept his word with “Parrafin Brain” (the combo’s debut single for Cherry Red that peaked at # 39 on the Independent Chart in April 1982), the only dusted off classic for tonight’s show. And actually, given that his latest album Mind over Matter (2015) reveals an inspiring Lloyd who is still in mortal combat with his muse, who can question his way of thinking?
For the uninitiated (aka the young), Robert Lloyd is the real deal. As a member of The Prefects, Birmingham’s first punk band, the 17-year-old frontman somehow found himself supporting The Clash on their legendary White Riot Tour (pay, four cans of beer!) And then playing alongside bands. from seminal punk Buzzcocks, The Damned and The Slits throughout 1977/78, delivering a set of Raw Bones that included his seven-second-long play “VD.” The Prefects parted ways before releasing an album, although Rough Trade achieved posthumous indie hit with the band’s Peel Session track “Going through the Motions” in 1980. Lloyd, Joe Motivator (guitar) and Paul Apperley (drums) passed to form The Nightingales, and the rest, as they say, is History.
Except, of course, that Robert Lloyd is a central character in an alternative, off the record of popular music history! Even when the group’s seven Peel Sessions and their unexpected longevity are allowed in, the spotlight has barely creased the brummie singer’s forehead, let alone lingered there for the full fifteen minutes! Lloyd, despite making a series of wonderfully abrasive post-punk albums and writing a plethora of incendiary pop tunes over a 40-year period, remains completely invisible to the general population. This is despite the fact that you could make an excellent case for Robert Lloyd to be the greatest British lyricist of his generation. If you were to imagine a spectrum of pop lyric writers stretching from Lennon and McCartney to Alex Turner and Ben Drew, incorporating the likes of Ray Davies, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Billy Bragg, Mark E. Smith, Morrissey and PJ Harvey, then you’d have all bases covered. However, neither, in my opinion, is equal to Lloyd.
Discussing Lloyd’s merits as a lyricist in the context of a Welsh live performance, where language is often turned into Glam gibberish by a barrage of Mickey Spillane riffs, may be a case of diving headfirst into the den. of the rabbit, but it is a journey worth undertaking. Lloyd, although he is capable of writing witty lines like this gem from “Bachelor Land”
‘Even Martial Arts Masters need to wash up a bit’,
or my favorite pop joke of all time, from the dizzy noir of “Insurance”,
‘Most of the words are in the dictionary, it’s just taking it off the shelf’,
is, most of the time, as surreal and impenetrable a lyricist as you will find anywhere in the art form, like the lyrics to “The Bending End” (which, along with “Bachelor Land” and “Insurance”, it may be that it is in the best album of the group Hysterics) makes (un) clear.
‘It reminds me of the TV meteorologist, a familiar face with a forgettable name / He had access to the film and the camera, he said he had a wicked nature / He said it in the stars the day he read them / This could be why The one who didn’t feel like using the medium she had access to, maybe it’s her lack of imagination / Who can say, who cares anyway? / Whatever the reason you never worry about the choice, you don’t even consider it / Tomorrow could be colder or warmer, what’s the use of complicating things even more? ‘
The happy chorus of the song
‘The day comes when all people agree to put Paul Daniels at work / Believing in the magician is futility / Notable powers are out of place in democracy’,
It is a cork stopper, but somehow you can’t imagine that it was played at the funeral of the family entertainer.
When the band re-formed in 2004, after a 15-year hiatus, which Lloyd spent primarily working as a postman, the “comeback” album “Out of True” (2006) saw the band pick up exactly where they left off, with a belligerent Lloyd showing he still had the stomach for the fight on songs like “Born Again in Birmingham”, “Let’s Talk about Living” (single of the week on BBC 6) and the gigantic slab of glam rock that is “Taking Away the The Stigma of Free School Dinners, “each of which is as good as anything else ever committed to vinyl in its heyday. “Out of True” also proved that Lloyd had also not lost his eye over the murder of the character, as highlighted by the devastating ballad “Black Country”,
‘He would borrow cash and shepherd his friends / and scratch the rash and will always be a user / Empathic liars in the drunk, they love a loser / But too expensive is such a friendship and they thank Christ who drank up die / It was a boil on the ass of the Black Country. ‘
“Out of True” was the beginning of a prolific period for Lloyd, with four other studio albums and a couple of live albums flowing from his venomous pen over the last decade, all to great critical acclaim and, as usually a general commercial disdain. Every one of those releases from the past few days evidenced the fact that the old pun was still firing from the lip, a fact confirmed once again by tonight’s dazzling set.
Going on stage, base player Andreas Schmidt gleefully introduces the band and that’s where all communication quickly ceases, until exactly one hour later when Lloyd, in response to the enthusiastic applause of the seventy punters present, clarifies his standard position in the encores “Thanks for coming, but no matter how long you clap or shout, we don’t do encores. There are other bands that do, but we don’t.” Then all of a sudden he’s gone. I saw him for the last time, upstairs at the Moon Club. , slumped on the corner sofa, arms outstretched and head tilted back in exhaustion.
However, there was still a lot to be liked about the Nightingales at night. Lloyd seemed to be in a good mood, which is not always the case (a performance at the 2011 Festival is remembered not only because of its impressive set, but because of Lloyd’s constant reprimands and harassment of his audience), while At the Buffalo Bar a few years ago a maniac Lloyd wandered through the crowd brandishing a microphone and suddenly I found myself recruited into an army of chorus girls in a swashbuckling rendition of “How to Age.”
Lloyd was content to just circle the stage tonight, arriving like a drunken Rocky XVIII heavyweight with too many fights under his well-stuffed belt, occasionally throwing a flurry of airy punches at an imaginary opponent, before breaking a series of moves. Last practiced by King Kong atop the Empire State Building, while crushing a squadron of fighter jets. It’s a glorious thing to remember the can-can that Lloyd performed, half crouching, when I first saw the band at the Poly of Wales thirty years ago.
Lloyd was quick to praise the star quality of the band’s current line-up (while the biography entry on the Nightingales Facebook page is contrarily relentless about some of their predecessors describing them as’ star-eyed wasters in time. biased, precious dudes and mercenaries’) and are more than up to their big billing tonight. “Dumb and Drummer”, a modern nightingale, and one of the many songs to show a howling duet with former Violet Violet drummer Fliss Kitson is an early highlight, closely followed by jackhammer versions of ” Thick and Thin “and” Bullet for Gove “. Nameless and unknown songs (a request for a track listing, so far, has not been answered) pass quickly, giving way to a scathing cacophony of rockabilly, post-punk and Glam, (the band even bursts into “Blockbuster” at halfway “Taffy comes home”). A gripping “Booze, Broads and Beauty” suddenly calms down, leaving Lloyd to “recite” a piece of stage poetry “Learn to Say Maybe”, albeit sadly omitting his best lines,
“Then he got a job at Eurosport covering dominoes, falconry and kendo / Then he got popular and won awards for innuendo and dirty old men.”
The concert comes to a gale-force finale with a landslide rendition of Mind over Matter’s “Bit of Rough” before the band makes an honorable retirement. Lloyd will do more heavy lifting in Leicester, Manchester, Bradford and Edinburgh before the month is out. Do not miss it!
I’m suddenly amazed that you didn’t mention Lloyd’s brief stint in costume as Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons in 1987/8, where our hero got a trendy haircut, signed to a major label, and wrote a couple of classic classics. of soul. , the best of which, the irrepressible catchy “Something Nice”, may be the best pop song ever written that you’ve never heard of. On the other hand, can that honor belong to your complementary piece “Part of the anchor”? You really should stop reading this now (I’m running out of things to say, anyway) and check out the songs yourself (making sure to watch Lloyd’s Snub TV performance below to catch a glimpse of that signature dance) and decide on. yourself.
