There’s one thing that really pisses me off about Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV and that’s just how many ‘guises’ he’s engaged in over the years: Francis Black, Frank Black, Black Francis. I mean, why doesn’t he just have a t-shirt printed saying ‘I have a deep and complex personality and requires the scope of character that a series of aliases affords me’. Granted, that’s too many words to have printed on a t-shirt, but you get my point; why the chuffing-hell bother. Multiple-personality disorder? The product of an undisciplined soul? A self-conscious desire to draw attention to his multi-fibrous creative vision? David Bowie never had this problem: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, blue eyed-soul boy, gnome-chum – it always said David Bowie on the cover. However daft his costume, however conceited his aim Bowie always seemed able to reconcile all these disparate threads and truss them up in one private hegemony. But not Francis – Francis is obsessed with personification and on feisty new album ‘Bluefinger’ – it comes to something of a head.
Directly or indirectly, all 11 songs reference Herman Brood, a man invariably described as the ‘Dutch personification of ‘sex, drugs and rock n roll’. A rock musician with a history going back to the 1960s, he and his band, Herman Brood and His Wild Romance experienced a degree of success in Europe before scoring a hit in the US with ‘Saturday Night’ in 1979. Outspoken, excessive and prone to leaping off roofs it was a life marred by drink and hardened by drugs. But it’s not his music that interests Francis, nor his recreational proclivities; it’s Brood’s art and his lust for life. Outspoken, unconventional and in the public eye for decades Brood embarked on a relationship with punky, bondage loving German artist, Nina Hagen whom he joined in the film Cha Cha along with Lena Lovich. He died at the age of 54. Told he had only a few months to live, Brood ran into the arms of the reaper by leaping off the roof of The Amsterdam Hilton in 2001.
And here is something of a homage. Ten new Frank Black originals and a cover of Brood’s ‘You Can’t Break A Heart And Have It’. Originally conceived as work he might start with The Pixies, Francis became gripped by the spirit of Brood and what began as a bonus track for his 93-03 Best Of .. transformed into a dozen or so razor sharp, hastily cut tracks bristling with the kind of belligerent beauty that Brood himself would be proud of.
Here’s the new Francis doing the old Francis as perceived through the eyes of someone else. How’s that for a mind-fuck?