Artist: Kevin Coyne
Title: Dynamite Daze
Description: album track, Dynamite Daze
Label: Virgin
Release date: 1978
First heard: 1988
Revolution!
I don’t expect people to have heard of Kevin Coyne. I know I hadn’t when a friend with more left-field taste than mine introduced me to his work in the late 80s. By then, the square-peg troubadour had put out about 20 albums, including live ones and a double LP he recorded in 1980 at the time of his nervous breakdown, backed on Disc 1 by Robert Wyatt and Disc 2 by the Ruts, a bizarre cocktail that might help place the prolific, self-propelled and often uncategorisable ex-psychiatric nurse from Derby. Like Wyatt, he forged his own towpath and sang the blues; but he also embraced the punk spirit, having a dig at the record industry and his label boss Richard Branson in Having A Party, and dedicating the title track of Dynamite Daze to Sid Vicious.
Dynamite Daze, one of Coyne’s raucous, rattlebag English-psychedelic “band” albums before a marked left turn into sparser, less populated recorded material, was the first of Coyne’s albums I heard in full, and although I’ve dug deep into his bottomless back catalogue since then – and thoroughly enjoyed his 21st century work, from the sweet Sugar Candy Taxi to his unintendedly posthumous swansong One Day In Chicago with Jon Langford (he died in 2004 after two years of living with lung fibrosis) – it remains a beacon. Its highlight is always a two-horse race for me, with the opening title track neck and neck with Amsterdam, an equally lively rock-out that heralds what we used to call Side Two and hymns the aromatic delights of the Dutch capital (“Down in the Melkweg, the heat is on, it’s smoking and knocking them out”).
The reason Dynamite Daze pips it is because it so brilliantly, breathlessly captures the sound of a musician enjoying his work. Coyne had a curious voice, squeaky, rasping, definitely melancholy in the blues tradition, but prone to outbursts of joy, too. I could recommend any number of Coyne’s quieter, more intimate ballads – on this album alone there’s the mournful, lovesick I Only Want To See You Smile, accompanied by yes-him Tim Rice at the piano, and the lilting Are We Dreaming with Paul Wickens on accordion – but Dynamite Daze is an unabashed stomp, counted in by a couple of guitars, one electric, one acoustic, and a whump.
That punk spirit I mentioned? “You see me and I stand outside the Palais de Dance, I’m rattling my bones, I’m pogoing.” (That’s the Hammersmith Palais by its more historic name.) He goes on to state for the record that he’s “in a rage, in a rage, waiting for the dynamite days … You little punks, come out to play.” However, a hairy man in his mid-30s, he’s under no illusions about being part of Generation X, and with typical world-weariness, he crows, “Revolution! Seen it all, seen it all before!”
The beat gallops, time is kept, guitars are thrashed, and through it all, Coyne’s almost comedic gurgle; impossible to tear your ears away from, it hiccups and free-forms, rising to a crazy, yodelling falsetto with total abandon, and then he cackles into the second verse, chuckling away like the “luna-luna-luna-luna-luna-luna-luna-tic” he evokes elsewhere (this is a man who will title a later album Sanity Stomp without irony). His voice is a unique instrument, his delivery unhampered by selfconsciousness or any foolhardy desire to sound authentic. Coyne’s kind of authenticity is not earned, it is innate. In his best East Midlands drawl, he ends Dynamite Daze with a throaty “Git ard of it!” which – despite the geographical remove – reminds me of one of my Northamptonian elders.
Coyne should be as cherished as any other in the canon of English musical eccentrics: Barrett, Stanshall, Moon, Brown, Davies, Harper, Lydon, Sensible, Albarn, Haines. In my world, he is.
Circles Of Life 