Ho Chi Minh was a kitchen gimp and fairly happy in his work. This is well known. Like others of his profession he pulled great globs of blood and grease and cloacal waste from drains with his bare hands and never complained. Then he went back and did it again and again until you or I would have been blubbering on our hands and knees. But not ‘Ho-Ho.’ He scrubbed the carbon scorches off tin-lined copper pans and the jaundiced piss stains from the tiles next to the urinal. He heaved grotesque carcass-sludge out of old rectangle braziers and laundered cream-soiled muslins so they could be re-used. He did this day in and day out in an endless lunacy of logic that is working in a kitchen; in Paris amongst the absinthe psychopaths - which was fine. They thought he was swell. Then in New York around the hopheads and 10^th Ave chimney sweeps. This too was bearable. Occasionally they would share a drink or slab of horse. That’s not a euphemism.

But then, for some stupid fucking reason he decided to try it in Ealing, West London, at the Drayton Court Hotel.

From there – history - like our man ‘Ho-Ho’ - becomes a little blurry. But we know that something just awful happened; because fairly soon afterwards he went home, raised the peasant population of his country and began killing hundreds of thousands of just about anyone. He turned the French Foreign Legion into steak haché, the American Marines into one-legged smack-heads, and got Stalin and Mao to stand when he entered a room, shake his hand and call him Sir, bitch.

I’m just saying: it’s nothing personal. Ealing can have that effect on a guy. I’ve lived here now about a year and I’m feeling the symptoms.

This concerns me presently because I’m standing at the bar of same Drayton Court Hotel, ebriate piece of Victorian architecture and straw-that-broke-the peoples’-revolutionary back of ‘Chi-Chi’ Minh, trying to catch the eye of the fucking bartender.

I would like her to like me. I would like her to take pleasure in her work. I would like a (fucking) drink. You see I would like this (no no don’tputyourselfout) drink because my name is on a list.  Not a death squad, though that too shall pass. There’s a jam session where local musos get onstage and play. Some are pretty good. Some are really not so good. And then there’s me.

What have I got to lose? I know we’re going to be dead soon. The ghost of ‘Ho-Ho’ is around here somewhere with a meat cleaver and a migraine. He probably thought he was going to some Buddho-Judaic Valhalla to be blown by munchkins.

The thump of guitars is coming through my feet. Not bass. Not drums. Guitars. God, this is going to be wretched. I see an old staircase at the back of the room that leads down to some awful depth. I want to apologise to the bartender for what I’m about to do, for having any part in this. I look at her pleadingly. It’s no good. I can see she’s imagining another way for me to die. I turn and head downstairs.

                                                            -            -            -

British blues is, for the most part, an irredeemably ugly mongrel that should have been dragged out with a coat hanger in 1959. Really, you just want stuff it in a sack, heave it into the nearest fast flowing river and close your ears to the yelping.

Now, it has to be said, blues can take a beating like little else. Your guitar can have two strings, one of them out of tune, and you can still sound great. You can have four teeth left in your head and a gut full of window cleaner, and sing a song to haunt me to the rest of my days. At the end of oblivion, when everything is dust and misery and death, some guy will be sitting on a pile of rubble with his intestines hanging out, blood coming from his ears and eye sockets, singing a song about the girl that just left him.

Da dee da da dum. 

Blues is proof that the beautiful must exist, because finally we require beauty from pain like we do order from chaos. When nothing else is left, when everything tells you should be thinking about death, it might even be the last reason finally to keep living.

Except British blues.

Don’t ask me why. If that’s all that’s left after the apocalypse, I’ll be the guy you pass on the street corner, beating in his own head with a brick. Really, if I can’t finish the job, you know, be a fucking Samaritan and lend a hand.

I understand the Stasi used to like playing it during interrogations to ease the flow of information. I hear they forwarded several ‘Best of’ compilation tapes to Guantanamo. Like a little flirtatious thing. Hey baby. Here’s somethin’ I made for ya. How about we suck tongue and attach electrodes to the first guy we see?

Da dee da da dum.

You want to know where British Blues was born?

That’s right. Ealing, West London, about 200 metres from the Drayton Court Hotel.

I’m willing to bet there’s a connection there somewhere. Vietnam. Mass slaughter. Guantanamo Bay. The Stasi. Torture. British Blues. The Drayton Court Hotel. Ealing.  It’s a black triangle of death and unbearable humiliation. It can’t be a coincidence. It just can’t be.

                                                -            -            -

Generally speaking, British Blues is a chimera of awfulness; like a group of chartered accountants rolling up their trousers and re-enacting the choreography to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The component parts may transmogrify into the familiar and back into the strange, but the awfulness remains.

I should know - I’m part of the problem. But there’s a funny thing about England. On any given day there are probably more brass bands in Yorkshire playing Duke Ellington arrangements than in New York and Saint Louis combined. Maybe it’s an English thing. We like to get up onstage and pretend we’re someone else. We’re like a nation of transvestites with a fabulous taste in shoes.

Then some child-eating ogre comes into the picture and proves you wrong. I can even tell you which. His name was John Mayall. And for some misplaced reason, all those years ago, his parents let him live.

He has a strange, strangled voice. I’m not saying it’s not pleasing; but he sounds like a guy from 1950’s Chicago who lost his leg in a train accident, and now he wants you to feel his stump.

But it’s not just that. He founded a group of young British players and between them they created a sound that no one had ever heard before. That’s what England did in the 60’s. America had Motown, R & B, Bob Dylan – England slurped it all up and (in a strange case of acid reflux) came up with the Beatles. America had Albert and BB King, Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson – and we had a young kid called Eric Clapton. He played guitar day and night. You can see him in the Mayall line-up, sitting against a wall, reading a Beano comic. The album, titled John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, has become known as the Beano album just because of that young kid, sitting against the wall. Most of the great American blues and rock players who came directly afterwards sat by their record players until they could play every note – Stevie Ray Vaughan could play it all, so can Eric Johnson – this strange, eerie music by these English trannies, all those miles away.

Clapton moved on, but Mayall wasn’t finished. He had an ability to choose young musical sociopaths and then really piss them off so they’d leave his band to earn a fortune elsewhere: Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood left to start Fleetwood Mac. Mick Taylor went to the Rolling Stones. A couple of others. Jack Bruce. He probably gave Ginger Baker his first wooden leg and told him to hit something.

Da de da da dum.

Downstairs at the Drayton Court, everything is dark. The guys onstage are in verse 73 of something or other and my spleen is trying to find an exit and make a run for Guadalajara. The man with the list is looking at me. It’s my turn next.

This is going to be a long night.

 

copyright,  © 2008 Moby Pomerance

visit our blog: http://newtextureblog.blogspot.com