Free Surf Music #3 is the sound of someone joyriding a UFO. It’s The Stray Cats with their drinks spiked, or a Tarantino movie set in the East Midlands. Put another way, this album is fourteen tracks of gloriously unhinged guitar twangs, inspired drum bursts of the Keith Moon variety, and moments of off the wall humour.
Alan Jenkins (The ‘Phil Spector-from-Leicester’) has helped a whole host of offbeat bands produce some of the most original yet determinedly uncommercial records of the nineties, every once in a while returning to continue with his Free Surf Music project and now we have #3, the latest installment…
The flagship track of this album is ‘The Slow Fat Pudding Explodes Naked’, which had an earlier outing on the Sorted Records compilation Havok Junction [sic]. It’s a real floor filler, a kind of excitable version of The Shadows with a climax of cheap synth brass stabs and sampled orgasm. It’s followed by the more sedate Grand Central which starts off like something from a David Lynch film, at once both camp and sinister, before meandering on, slow swing beats adorned by hotel bar keyboards and lazy harmonica in a sinuous, eleven minute jam.
Then, we have the irresistibly twee (and wonderfully named) ‘I Walk the Lion’ which grooves along nicely, like a gay Joe 90.
‘Talking Cat’ is perhaps as close as the album comes to conventional surf music (sampled dog barks excepted) and ‘Badly Painted Cheese’ is as louche as Jason King in a wine bar.
Floating through the fringes of this album is the spirit of the Bonzo Dog Band, coming momentarily to the fore in the rather marvelous Erotic Poetry which sounds like Stephen Hawkins reciting dodgy surrealist lines over some pretty impressive drumming.
‘What Moose?’ Adds some mariachi-infused brass solos into the surf mix and ‘The Governors’ Beach’ is a gentle come down a la Chris Isaak.
Jenkins and his Tubes (Blodwyn P Teabag, Aiden Hallet, Johnny Pacino and Jeremy Barnes plus friends) have given us another inspired, ramshackle slice of surf music – appropriately ironic emanating as it does from Leicestershire, a thoroughly landlocked county.
And so, in today’s climate of heightened tensions, ultra-seriousness and vicious insanity, where cheap cartoons provoke calls for beheadings, it’s good to find a bunch of madmen I can actually recommend listening to.