Tav Falco may make his
living as a Tango teacher in Vienna, but the role of dancer and
choreographer are just two more notches on the Curriculum Vitae of an
artistic polymath who can also include writer, actor, film-maker and
artist on what is no-doubt a sepia-tinted document that's been passed
around town like a dirty postcard more than once.
Top of the list,
however, must be Falco's status as avant-blues singer, musical
iconoclast and leader for more than thirty years of the ever-changing
band of low-slung retro-nouveau rockers known as Panther Burns.
For his first dates in
Scotland in a couple of lifetimes, Falco brings an all-European band
to town in a show that may more resemble an old-time revue than a
fleapit or garden gig, featuring as it does a top notch Tango display
by Falco himself, while a band that wouldn't look out of place at a
bump n' grind burlesque night in a David Lynch film plays on.
Falco may have crawled
straight out of Memphis, the original home of rock and roll and blues
before it, rewinding its way from Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny
Cash to Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and Robert Johnson, but his
influences name-check a high-falutin' set of reference points,
including Antonin Artaud's 'The Theatre and It's Double', Beat
novelist and cut-up pioneer, William S Burroughs, Dadaist poet Louis
Aragon, creator of TV science-fiction show The Twilight Zone, Rod
Serling, and Marshall McLuhan's theories on mass media, sometimes in
the same song.. This wasn't just rock n'roll. This was art, as the
appalled host of a TV breakfast show Falco and co appeared on early
in their career found out for herself when Falco described the band
as a “neo-rumourist orchestra” creating an “anti-environment.”
Having spent the 1970s
taking verite photographic portraits of Memphis blues veterans, Falco
named his band after a local Memphis plantation, which itself was
borne from the legend of a predatory panther who stalked the local
populace until he was caught and set alight. The panther's screams,
so it was said, were 'an unholy amalgam of animal lust and divine
transubstantiation', which was something for Falco to aim for.
Falco had already
forged early alliances with fellow Memphisites The Cramps and Big
Star's Alex Chilton (reinvented as LX Chilton when he played with
Falco, if you please), and would go on to become a contemporary of
Jeffrey Lee Pierce's Gun Club. In the twenty-odd releases between
their 1981 debut album, 'Behind The Magnolia Curtain' and their most
recent collection of original material, 2010's 'Conjurations: Séance
For deranged Lovers', some seventy-five members have passed through
Panther Burns' ranks, including former Sonic Youth and Cramps drummer
and current member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Jim
Sclavunos.
While Falco has
influenced the likes of Spacemen 3 and Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion,
he remains a one-off original. The style may be retro, but Falco and
co are no pastiche novelty number either. Instead, with a 450 page
psycho-geographic history of Memphis under his belt, as well as
appearances in Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, 'Great Balls of Fire!' and
'Highway 61', Falco remains an authentic archivist and keeper of the
flame who, like some kind of anti Stray Cats, keeps on pushing at the
limits of his chose oeuvre.
The result is a
calculatedly raw but deliciously honed mix of garage-punk
vaudevillian showmanship, though Falco himself would probably prefer
his own self-styled description of Panther Burns as “a Southern
Gothic, psychedelic country band influenced by Memphis musical
styles.”
With Tango.
Tav Falco and His
Famous, Unapproachable Panther Burns play Broadcast, Glasgow,
February 9, with The Primevals and The Reverse Cowgirls; Voodoo
Rooms, Edinburgh, February 12, with The Fnords and Sterling Roswell.
ends
The List, February 2014
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