Talking With The Taxman About Hookworms

I spent a happy hour, on and off, listening to a Radio 4 podcast this morning. The series looks at classic albums and the artists who made them, usually from a distance of 15 - 20 years. 

I bought Talking With The Taxman About Poetry when it came out, from a shop in Newark long gone, called Inner Sleeve. It was a few weeks before I left for university and I was - still am - a big fan of Bragg. So listening to the man reminisce about the circumstances, political and personal, around the recording of this album was delightful to me. 

I felt the emotional intensity of Levi Stubbs Tears in a way which I don't remember when I first heard it. For me it was always the relationship songs which hit hardest with Bragg, which isn't to overlook the likes of To Have And To Have Not or Between The Wars. The Saturday Boy, The Warmest Room, and Greetings To The New Brunette are all terrific pop songs from an artist often brushed over as a one-note political balladeer.

So I'm at home with a cup of tea - listening to the album for the first time right through for years, and fretting again about whether it's worth scouring the new releases pages of the heritage rock mags and the social media feeds of all manner of record labels, blogs, review sites in search of a release half as diverting as the aforementioned Bragg album, or Hatful Of Hollow, or Maxinequaye, or Bandwagonesque or any number of other records which now seem very long in the tooth but which repay any number of repeated listens. I am sceptical that the latest neo-psych CD currently being drooled over online will be played more than once or twice. Trust me, I've had a desultory flick through Fuzz, by Fuzz, and it was very underwhelming.

Can it be anything else? Coming as it does many decades after those unsurpassable early Sabbath albums, as well as all the other cooler than cool touchstones that the bloggers like to froth about - Blue Cheer, in this instance. If you can only talk about a record in reference to other records, well, that's a bit of a dead end isn't it? It's hard not to sound churlish here; I've spent a good part of this year listening to the kind of psych rock which is currently, and briefly, one assumes, in vogue - the undisputed highlight being the Hookworms album. At least they impart a fresh intensity to the genre, they are not stoned noodlers, there are no side-long jams or recycled fuzzy riffs disinterred from the early 1970s (although I detect a fondness for Hawkwind, which the band denies). Instead they lock into a ferocious punch and groove on the album opener Away/Towards - genuinely, I think the best album opening track I've heard for years - yet they have a lightness and imagination sufficient to carry off slower numbers like In Our Time.

Answering my own question, yes there are new albums being released which are absorbing, exciting and rewarding, the Hookworms debut 'Pearl Mystic' being an example. My problem is sifting them out from other far more mediocre fare which receives breathless plaudits from reviewers who are either still in short trousers or who have difficulty distinguishing between music which is genuinely diverting and that which is serviceable but pedestrian.

Here's Leeds' finest filmed in their studio: