The thing about cults, you see, is that there’s almost certainly something alarm-ringingly wrong-in-the-head about them. Otherwise the natural human sheep-herding instinct would have kicked in wouldn’t it, and when there’s no more room in the paddock, it’d have to move to larger premises and probably end up building a ticket office and merchandising stand into the entrance hall. Then it loses its privileges and can be a cult no longer. Meaning a cult can only actually be a cult up to a point. Meaning ongoing indie cult concern Chris TT is perennially beneath that point. Meaning he must be giving off some kind of sign that prevents herds of any consequence flocking toward him. Which is right. And that sign is that for all his trying he’s not actually as good as he pertains to be.
He’s like a little chap reaching for the light switch, stacking books up against the wall, wearing his thickest soles, standing on tip-toes, stretching wildly, but always falling an inch short, plummeting back down to earth with a bump and the room and all its contents remaining bathed in darkness. As a socially conscious (or at least avid newspaper reader), outside the slipstream London singer-songwriter he’s gained a fairly fanfare-willing group of devotees, but without any contemporaries as such (there’s no equivalent to NYC’s anti-folk scene here) there’s nothing to tag him with and nothing to keep him up on his toes. So he falls down, often coming across as little more than a poor man’s Billy Bragg. And Bill’s already got that corner of society pretty much covered.
His London-based tales range from the surreal (‘Giraffes #1’) to the sad (‘Seven Hearts’). They verge on the anthemic (take opening track ‘London Aquarium’) in a two pints of lager and a packet of roasted nuts in Camden type way. But his words are obviously the centrepiece, though as vividly as he utters them in a pronounced cockney half-shout, that can’t account for a lack of poetic licence and their undeveloped simplicity. There’s a point when a thought becomes an idea and he mills around beneath it aimlessly. It all comes together quite nicely on ‘Cull’, for a brief few minutes skirting very close to a latter-day organic Carter USM, even finding some succinct and damning words. And there are some great couplets on here, take “I was drinking at the BBC, when someone put ketamine in my tea”. But there’s no sense of completion. Once a cult, always a cult I guess.
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