Sounds From The Junkshop #78 - Chris T-T

 

"I fell in love on April Fools' Day/I dug a hole so deep it scared me" - Chris T-T - Tomorrow Morning

In my post-uni years, as I've mentioned in the Dead Pets SFTJ entry, I was a bit aimless when it came to music (and indeed life in general). I was rapidly becoming disillusioned  with whatever Strokes/Limp Bizkit rehash the NME and Kerrang respectively were trying to foist on me week in week out and was starting to wander off the beaten track a bit in terms of trying to find music I liked.

I've often said that by 2002-3 sort of time I was pretty much done with "indie" music - sure there were a few good bands who managed to sneak through the hole in the wall that the Strokes created but by the time the Libertines came along with their club-footed third division take on the Only Ones' classic formula it seemed like we were stuck in a downward spiral of diminishing returns - Razorlight, the Arctic Monkeys, the Cribs, the Fratellis, the View...by the time the whole "landfill indie" scene had bottomed out with the dreadful likes of the Pigeon Detectives and Scouting For Girls and all of the other bands who sounded like hopeless Vauxhall Conference versions of Menswe@r, I was long since out of the door.

That said, there were a few bands in this era of extremely slim pickings in terms of quality who did manage to punch their way through into my listening and I'm sure we'll be covering a few of them in the coming months here on SFTJ - the likes of Easyworld, Hoggboy, McLusky, the Barbs, the Cooper Temple Clause and the Electric Soft Parade were at least trying to do something different with the tired and tested (sic) indie formula to make it vaguely interesting. And it was while watching a Jim Bob solo gig one night that I found someone else who was at least trying to do some simple honest heartfelt songwriting in an age where tedious detached irony was strangling all the soul out of alternative music. His name was Chris T-T.

I'd first become aware of Chris when his single Eminem Is Gay (Chris was always keen to stress that the single wasn't meant to be homophobic and was more a light-hearted imagining of a scenario where Mr Mathers, whose lyrics at the time were coming under a bit of scrutiny over their "is it isn't it?" homophobia, was caught in flagrante in exactly such a situation and how the press and his agents would deal with it) was reviewed in Kerrang! by reality TV star and professional nepotist Jack Osborne who clearly didn't see the funny side and gave it an absolute slagging which only served the purpose of making him look like a prize pillock (not difficult I know) and making me keen to check it out. It was actually good fun and tackled the subject wittily making it more of a mockery of the sort of knuckleheads who take gangster rap that tiny bit too literally without coming across as bigoted in any way. I was intrigued to find out more.

Just before the Jim Bob gig, Chris put out a new album called London Is Sinking just and the review I read of it compared it to Carter USM which only made me even more interested and it was good to see him on the same bill as one half of that band and I was suitably impressed that I picked up a copy of the album from Jumbo soon afterwards. I still listen to it now and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone unlucky enough not to be acquainted with it. It's kind of like what you'd imagine would happen if Jim Bob and Ray Davies decided to collaborate on an album, a sort of semi-conceptual affair about a day in London which ends with London Bridge blowing up and a girl in a coracle who's set sail from Kingston a day before rescuing the survivors. En route there's tales of domestic disputes (Tomorrow Morning), infanticide (the chilling Battersea Bridge Baptism), flying giraffes (album highlight Giraffes #1) and having your tea spiked with ketamine (Moths And Bees). Elsewhere, Cull is a furious anti-war song which seems even more depressingly apt in the current day with the situation in Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen etc - "It's all gonna be the same in the end/A moment of glory to show off to your friends/But when it's gone, the motherfucker's gone/We all go home and we all ignore millions and billions and trillions more/There is no ending to this song". Similarly, The Tin Man really showed how good Chris was as a lyricist - "No-one saw your hand/You held the strongest card/But you played them like a novice/So now you're right back to the start/You can't sack the director when you're only a bit part/No-one is responsible for you except you".

I liked London Is Sinking so much in fact that the next time I went to see Chris (I think this might have been at the Vine in Leeds where my old band used to play and occasionally promote gigs back in the day), I picked up a copy of its predecessor The 253* which was kind of part 1 of the two part London story (indeed, I'm pretty sure that Susan in the closing song on there N253 is the same Susan who appears in Battersea Bridge Baptism in London Is Sinking). This was another good effort with songs about Tony Robinson and the Time Team programme discovering the Holy Grail in Somerset and thus rendering all world religion obsolete (Build A Bridge, Burn A Bridge), the frustration of Sunday lethargy (Sellotape (Dawson's Creek) with its opening line of "I give up, we're all fucked") and Drink Beer which was like a more light-hearted take on the old Carter classic Anytime Anyplace Anywhere.

* - Interesting sidenote - the album is named after the London bus route from Euston to Hackney via Camden, Holloway and Finsbury Park. Which, when I moved to London about seven or eight years later, was my regular bus service home from nights out at various Camden venues or the sadly missed Gaff venue in Holloway back to my poky little NHS flat behind the back of Homerton Hospital. Funny how life works like that sometimes, ain't it?

Chris would continue making album for a good decade plus after London Is Sinking - 9 Red Songs saw him putting together a more political album with the The Huntsman Comes A-Marchin' (written to celebrate pro-fox hunting protester scumbags getting beaten up by the police) the anti-Blair Tony's Heart and the vitriolic tabloid bashing of Uh...The Press showing a much angrier side to his repertoire. 2008's Capital would prove to be the final part of his London trilogy and he would go on producing albums up until 2016's 9 Green Songs (another excellent angry political affair as evidenced on tracks like Worst Government Ever, Love Me I'm A Liberal and the heartbreaking closer The Crossing) after which he announced he was putting the operation to bed as he couldn't afford to keep losing money on it. A real shame.

It's a real pity that while the world deservedly took Frank Turner to their hearts for his not entirely different style of music that Chris T-T ended up pretty much staying resolutely underground in terms of popularity - the pair actually often gigged together and Chris would even end up alongside the likes of Turner, Beans on Toast and Skinny Lister (all kindred spirits) on the Xtra Mile label in the latter stages of his career. I think these days that he's part of Jim Bob's backing band the Hood Rats although I stand to be corrected on this. Either way, if you missed the guy first time out then I thoroughly recommend that you investigate London Is Sinking, 9 Red Songs, The 253 and 9 Green Songs at the very least, all of them are excellent albums and really should have reached a much wider audience than they did. Do we dare dream that the guy'll pick up his guitar and write another album one day. Well, stranger things have happened but rest assured that if it does then definitely put me down for a copy.

(Quick footnote btw - Chris TT's Bandcamp page is still up and running and if you're unlucky enough to be unacquainted with his music then I humbly suggest you give it a visit and enjoy)