Sounds From The Junkshop #116 - Jackdaw 4

 

"Live music is dead/The funeral's on Thursday/Bring a bottle and a bed" - Jackdaw 4 - Karaoke Ballet

They were an odd one, Jackdaw 4. Emerging in the early noughties, the group were the brainchild of one Mr Willie Dowling who we've previously encountered a few times on SFTJ's past, not least due to his brief tenure with the Wildhearts in the Earth Vs era. Willie had actually started out with late '80s Soho glammers the Grip who offered a more measured take on the whole Babysitters/Soho Roses formula and managed a pretty decent album called Be Yourself before going their separate ways in the early '90s. It was probably while he was with the Grip that Willie befriended Ginger and CJ who were in the Quireboys and the Tattooed Love Boys respectively around this time and he would join up with the Wildhearts as their keyboard player in late '93, playing on the B-sides to the Caffeine Bomb and Suckerpunch singles (also appearing in the video for the latter) as well as the original Fishing For Luckies album. However, he would leave the band in the summer of '94 and, along with CJ who'd been booted out by Ginger around the same time, move on to form Honeycrack.

We've covered Honeycrack in SFTJ already and I'll restate here that I thought they were a decent group but they kind of got blown out of the water a bit by CJ and Willie's old band around this time. I mean, Prozaic was a good solid album but compared to Phuq which the 'Hearts put out in the same era, it could only end up looking like a poor relation. They would split in 1998 with CJ moving on to the Jellys before reconciling with Ginger shortly after the millennium and Willie putting the band together that would eventually mutate into Jackdaw 4 (they started out as the Sugar Plum Fairies then became the Celebrity Squares for a couple of singles before eventually settling on the name they'd stick with for the rest of their existence).

(A quick footnote here - on top of the above, Willie is a man of many musical talents, his other duties involve writing music for TV shows in his spare time and he even pops up in Tony Hawks' book One Hit Wonderland in which the former Morris Minor & The Majors singer makes a bet with a pre-fame Simon Cowell that he can get a second Top 20 hit somewhere in the world. Willie helps Tony write a country and western song to try and break the US midwest market which is rather brilliantly called You Broke My Heart Like An Egg (But Now The Yolk's On You). Sadly it didn't give Hawks his follow up hit but the book is very much worth a read if you fancy a chuckle)

The group's debut album, Gramophone Logic, surfaced in 2004 and I remember picking up a copy pretty much mainly on the Wildhearts connection. Which is probably why it threw me for a massive loop when I first heard it because it really couldn't be anything less like Ginger and co (apart perhaps from its inventiveness and willingness to mess with traditional song structures). But it quickly nestled its way into my regular listening and ended up being one of my favourite albums of that year. Mixing Beach Boys/Beatles style pop sensibilities with some viciously barbed lyrics (listen to This Is Your Life, The Day I Wrote The Book or Deep And Meaningless for proof), it was a genuinely great effort. It even spawned the group a hit single, albeit in Malta of all places, with the dreamy King For A Day, the poppiest moment here and arguably one of the band's best songs.

Jackdaw 4 were arguably one of those groups who were always going to be a bit of a cult band because they never really seemed to fit in anywhere but to those who listened to their four albums they were one of the British music scene's great secrets. 2007's Bipolar Diversions was another great effort right from the opening line of "The sun shines out of my ass!" on Sooma (All This Vision) with other highlights including the brutally hilarious My Little Gangsta and the gentle light-hearted Jesus Wants My Soul Back.

Jackdaw 4 would stick around for two more albums after this, 2010's The Eternal Struggle For Justice and 2012's Dissecticide, both good efforts as well - give We Sold It All (supposedly written about Iggy after he crapped out and started flogging car insurance on the telly) and Baby I'm A Killer off the former and Abigail's Last Hurrah and Life's A Celebration (For The Few) off the latter a listen. They even did a World Cup song in 2010, The Beautiful Game which I suspect wasn't something anyone expected from them but it was a good effort.

Jackdaw 4 would call it a day around 2013 I seem to remember - I'm guessing that after over a decade, they just kind of felt they'd taken things as far as they could and decided to move on to pastures new. Willie would end up forming the Dowling Poole with fellow Wildhearts refugee and ex-Cardiacs man Random Jon Poole and you can kind of see the foundations of the sort of direction that band would take on some of the later Jackdaw 4 albums. Guitarist John Steel and drummer Kate Stephenson meanwhile would end up joining fellow SFTJ alumni China Drum and featuring on their rather good brace of comeback singles earlier this year - hopefully more is to come from there.

Jackdaw 4 definitely fall into the category of one of those bands who were arguably swimming massively against the tide right from day one but if some brilliantly acerbic twisted pop with pinpoint precision lyrics floats your boat then I really can't recommend them enough. And rather helpfully, all of their output is still available over at their Bandcamp page so feel free to go have a listen and treat yourself when your Christmas money comes in. It'll be cash well invested I promise you.

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ANDY'S NOTE: As well as being the last SFTJ of 2022, this is also our last SFTJ entry from 2004. I was hoping to do a Footnotes but for some reason there really didn't seem to be many bands from this year who fitted into that. Which either means that it wasn't as good a year or that all the bands I did end up first encountering this year were so brilliant that a simple couple of paragraphs wouldn't have sufficed. And I'll let you be the judge of that. Anyway, we'll have one more Garbage Days Revisited for you in a couple of days then we're taking a break to do our regular end of year rundown and we'll see you in 2023/2005. Have a great Christmas everybody.