Folk music’s most “convincing” star, according to Frank Black
You know you’ve got something pretty special when you inspire David Bowie to jump into the sharpest creative U-turn of his career. Falling in love with Pixies and the American alternative rock dominating college radio toward the end of the 1980s, Bowie abandoned his preposterous Glass Spider Tour and even ceased performing as a solo artist, leading the hard rock band Tin Machine in pursuit of artistic rejuvenation, albeit with varying results.
Aside from some of the most electrifying rock and roll committed to record, frontman Frank Black imbued the Pixies’ early run of albums with an eclectic palette of influences and styles as idiosyncratic as his lyrical obsessions. Surfer rock, anthemic indie, and easy-listening pastiche all include songs exploring biblical violence and UFOs from their debut Carry On Pilgrim EP.
Black’s Teenager of the Year still stands as the record that illustrates his chequered curiosity. It cuts a distinctly eccentric character amid a 1990s music climate that, at times, lacked a sense of humour. Its feverish whack-a-mole between power pop, psychedelia, and even a dash of skewed ska documents Black indulging in every artistic whim with success.
Selecting records last month for Uncut‘s ‘My Life In Music’ feature, Black dusted off records from his formative years that curiously avoided anything in the way of punk or too hard rock. Crediting his cousin’s record collection and the generous vinyl giveaway from a PE teacher with informing his developing musical tastes, Black picked out LPs from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Jethro Tull.
It was London folk artist Cat Stevens, named Yusuf Islam since his Islamic conversion in 1977, and his Mona Bone Jakon album that struck Black with its sense of authenticity. He said: “My parents took me to see Harold and Maude when it came out, and that’s where I would have heard this music first before I had a copy of the record. They’re pop music arrangements, with percussion and background vocals and keyboards and sometimes strings, but it’s still dry – not super-fancy, not lush.”
Adding: “It’s more about the beauty of the instrument. And, of course, the real instrument of beauty on that record is Cat Stevens’ voice. His vocal delivery is very original – it has this beautiful masculine muskiness to it. And one of the things I like about Cat Stevens is that even when he’s being precious in a singer-songwriter kind of way, you really believe him. Whatever he’s selling, it’s so convincing.”
If one genre’s going to demand conviction, it’s folk. Before his soundtrack work on the Harold and Maude black comedy, his third album, Mona Bone Jakon, marked a shift away from the teen base Stevens reluctantly garnered with his orchestral-laden pop to a more focused and spiritually involved folk rock direction, accelerated by a lengthy spell in hospital with tuberculosis, and a new sonic direction with production from The Yardbirds’ bassist Paul Samwell-Smith.
Steven’s rugged but heartfelt songs continued for the rest of his career, alongside his explorations of Islamic music and a brief foray into proto-synthpop. His knack for expressing masculine vigour without the trappings of machismo left an indelible mark on the young Black, who similarly possessed a gift for lyrically examining his own male psyche while avoiding misogynistic clichés or phallic rock parodies.
