Brendan Croker: Short biography and discography |
Brendan Croker was born in 1953 in Leeds, where the Mekons met and were found. His love was with with country blues and folksongs: like music by Sleepy John Estes, jesse Fuller and Blind Willie McTell. He started out in the british pu-rock-scene, never really interested in rock career thinking.
Round 85 he gathered some musicians around him and founded the 5 O'Clock Shadows with
Mark 'Mr.' Creswell: g, voc
Nigel Brooke: b, voc and
Graeme 'TRaffic' Pollard: dr, perc, vov
Croer didn't want top play the authentic blues or country stuff, he was always thinking of a varied mixture of related styles (Blues, Rockabilly, American Folgsong ...) , which should be combined in an original way. How he set his ideas into work has been compared to Ry Cooder, his rather smoky voice, his brittle guitar playing. But that never said anything against his originality.
In 1986 he released his debut album 'A Close Shave' on the indie label 'Unamerican Acrivities', which was only known in smaller parts of the universe. This followed several months later by his second attempt 'Boat Trips In The Bay' (originallly to be released by Rhino); this time he had 2 new members in the 5 O'Clock SDhadows: David Cury: dr and Marcus Cliffe: bs (he prodced the album too). Both records brought mainly covers of quite unknown blues- or folksongs, sometimes you hear a Reggae or a south-american jive or other 'exotic' styles.
In the meantime Croker along to the Shodows had another project running with an old pal: Steve Philiips, who didn't only play the guitars buit build them too. This was the basis for the later Notting Hillbillies. Through Philips, who had been befriended with Mark Knopfler for some years, he got in contakt with Knopfler, with whom he had already jammed around Leeds before. Mark K. got interested in B. Croker's music and wanted to assist the duo. To the sessions he brought alog Guy Fletcher, who played keyboard and guitar with Dire Straits. But it lasted a few months till they had their first show.
Through Knopfler Croker got contact with London musicians as well. He had been playing with the Mekons before as well as on Tanita Tikaram's debut LP, where he sang on 'He likes the sun'. For the British TV-series 'On The Big Hill' (about the climbing of Mount Everest) he wrote the soundtrack - alpng with Steve Philips.
His third album 'Brendan Croker and the 5 O'Clock Shadows was produced by John Porter. Croker was the first artist to be signed by Silverztone, Andrew Lauder's label. On this album Croker is joined yb Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher from Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Tanita Tikaram and others. There were 2 Shadows left: Mark Creswell and Marcus Cliffe. (Both were jazz musicians, who had studied at the Leeds College of Music.) Now the music is much more polished, the edges are gone.
Until now Brendan Croker was relatively unknown. This changed when in 1990 the first Notting Hillbillies album was published: 'Missing ... Presumed Having A Good Time'. This was a Croker album too, all songs were sung by him. The album sold quite well and was followed by a 6 weks tour through the UK.
After a short intermission the 4th Shadows album was released: 'The Great Indoors'. It was released together with Dire Straits opus: On Every Strets. It remained in the that shadow and was hardly noticed.
Brendan Croker Is a Genius
But will we ever give him the acclaim he deserves? Acknowledged as a
world-class songwriter, admired by Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler,
"Britain's Ry Cooder" speaks to William Whiteside about his eccentric career
and his homage to Hank Williams.
I first met Brendan Croker three years ago, on a mutual friend's stag night
in a small town just outside Mexico City. The latter stages of the evening
have mercifully passed into oblivion, though I do remember him steering the
groom's father - an OAP with an artificial leg, who had never previously
travelled outside the UK - into a vile-looking cantina, with the words "Did
you ever have cocaine, Herry, when you were in the army?"
Once inside the bar, whose facilities included urinals that had been
installed but never plumbed in, our party's arrival excited a lively
response from the regulars, who engaged us in friendly conversation for a
couple of hours. Then - influenced, perhaps, by the torrent of Victoria
beer and mescal - the atmosphere took on a character of mounting hostility,
which became unmistakable even to the more exhilarated foreign visitor when
our one fluent Spanish speaker began to interpret phrases such as "knife
fight."
At the height of our unease a guitar appeared in the way that they do -
seemingly by magic - in Elvis Presley musicals. Croker picked it up and
sang them Hank Williams's "Your Cheatin' Heart." It was a high-risk
strategy, but within the first few bars of the song - which he followed with
the Jim Reeve number "He'll Have to Go" - I could sense a second volte-face
by our fellow-drinkers, this time from psychotic loathing to a kind of
transfixed awe. We then left immediately, our would-be assassins' leader
discreetly pressing an unsolicited packet of hashish into the singer's hand
on the way out.
"I'm really glad we went in there," Croker told me, out in the street.
"Mexico - what a fine country. What a busy people."
First impressions can be misleading, of course, but the incident illustrates
a number of Brendan Croker's qualities, not least his convivial nature, his
fondness for adventure, and the emotional power of a singing voice that has
an affecting combination of roughness and sensitivity.
The term "maverick" miht have been invented for Croker. Over the past 15
years, he has produced a number of breathtaking rhythm and blue and
country-influenced recordings, and is admired by such figures as Eric
Clapton, John Mayall, and his frequent collaborator Mark Knopfler.
"He is a world-class songwriter," says his long-term ally Andy Kershaw, "and
a tremendous singer. I have always thought of him as a British Ry Cooder.
He has one of those rare voices that sound almost black. If Brendan Croker
had surfaced in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1969 instead of Yorkshire in
1979, he'd have made a bigger impact than he has."
I met up with Croker again earlier this week in the bar area of a Pizza
Express in central London. The arrival of the 45-year-old, with shaven
head, diamond ear-studs and tattooed forearms, seemed to inspire - as it
usually does - a certain foreboding among our fellow customers.
He had come to talk about Dying to Sing, his week-long series of concerts at
the Twelve Bar Club, Tottenham Court Road, dedicated to the work of dead pop
artists. But Croker, who is uninterviewable in any normal sense and appears
bored by talking about his own work, was soon reminiscing about the problems
currently besetting an impoverished earl who, he says, accompanies him on
woodpigeon shoots at home in Yorkshire.
"As I told him," Croker boomed at one point, "what do you expect if you turn
up outside the door of every woman on your estate demanding droit de
seigneur?"
The Twelve Bar project - at which Croker, with a varied supporting cast of
musicians, will perform the work of dead stars including Kurt Cobain, Bob Ma
rley and Vivian Stanshall - is a typically idiosyncratic scheme.
"It started from a conversation about the Little Feat singer Lowell George,"
he told me. "One of my friends said 'My God, don't you miss him, as a
songwriter.' Then we got talking about Rick Nelson."
Nelson, Croker recalled, blew his own plane up, reportedly because he
insisted on freebasing cocaine while the plane was landing.
"I'm fascinated by these people," he said, "as they made other people's
lives better, often at the expense of their own."
Brendan Croker himself has made several magnificent records - notably Boat
Trips in the Bay in the late Eighties, and the splendidly titled Redneck
State of the Art in 1995. Shortly before that, he wrote What It Takes for
the American country star Wynona Judd: it sold 4 million copies and earned
Croker more than £100,000. Then, just as he had established himself as a
Nashville songwriter, collaborating with the legendary Chet Atkins, he
apparently lost interest and set off on an acoustic tour of Belgian prisons.
It was a typical career move for the singer who has, I suggested, frustrated
many supporters with his perverse indifference to success.
"Well, I'm sorry I've been a disappointment to you William," sneered Croker.
"I do believe I've had the potential to make big-selling records, but
nobody's really known quite what to do with them."
Brendan Croker, who was born in Bradford and studied at the local college of
art, was 30 when he started recording seriously. Before that, he had
something of a chequered CV.
"i had jobs - I was a bin man and a railway guard," he said, "but I
generally got fired for enjoying myself. Yorkshire Electricity Board- that
was a good sacking."
He was painting scenery at Leeds Playhouse when he fell in with the virtuoso
blues guitarist Steve Phillips, who taught both Croker and Mark Knopfler,
and still performs with their occasional group, the Notting Hillbillies.
"One of the things I like about the band," said Croker, "is the way that it
isn't overburdened with ambition. One of my favourite songs is the single
by Johnny Paycheck: "Take This Job and Shove It: I Ain't Working Here No
More."
What about his retreat from Nashville, just as things were taking off?
"I loved the innocence of the place at first," he said. "Before it all
turned into a cynical big business. I don't like what they are doing now,
musically or socially, so I don't go there." Boredom, says Brendan Croker's
associate Paul Crockford ("manager", in relation to Croker, is probably not
a meaningful term) is a recurring problem.
"He gets tired of things," Crockford said. "He has always adhered to the
principle of 'don't do what you can do, do what you can't,' and that's why
he's so interesting. If he were richer," Ceockford added, "he'd be
eccentric, but he's poor, so he's mad."
Croker's live shows are always compelling, if only for his fondness for
involving the audience - often with terrifying prominence - and his
refreshingly unpretentious philosophy. Last year, at a Notting Hillbillies
concert at Ronnie Scott's, Mark Knopfler, looking slightly out of place
among his old Leeds pals in a hand-stitched grey silk shirt, introduced a
number as "One of my songs that just about everybody's recorded."
"OK," said a gruff Yorkshire voice at his elbow, "who's done it then? Dame
Thora Hird? Archbishop Tutu?"
On stage or not, Croker is a man who knows no sense of shame.
"One of the worst moments in my life," says the journalist Mark Ellen, " was
with Bredan Croker in a London pub, packed with city traders in red braces.
He had a guitar case with him, and he said 'What's your favourite Woody
Guthrie song?' I told him 'Grand Coolee Dam.' He got to his feet, shushed
these hundred bankers to silence, turned to me and bellowed 'Sing it man.
Sing it now.'"
The stage backdrop at the Twelve Bar Club, Croker told me, will consist of
Jon Langford's portrait of Hank Williams, pierced with arrows, in the pose
of the martyred Saint Sebastian.
"I do slightly regret," said Croker, "that I can't do the odd song by people
who are still alive. I don't wish ill on anybody," he added. "That said, I
am aware that a rock star's life is an uncertain business, and pavements can
be slippy when wet. Late-comers will not be ruled out."
In a few months, Croker's entire back catalogue will be reissued, together
with a "best of" compilation. Was he planning a new album, given that his
last CD, Three Chord Love Songs, came out a couple of years ago?
"I've started to feel I've made too many records," he told me. "The next
one I make, I want to die for every line I write."
His immediate plans after the London shows, he told me, are to spend some
time in Leeds looking after his two carthorses.
"I think I like carthorses," he said, "because they don't do anything they
don't want to do. That," Croker added, "is a good example for anyone."