The Real Tuesday Weld – Radio Clerkenwell Paris DJs Mix
The Real Tuesday Weld were formed by Stephen Coates in 1999 inspired by dreams of crooner Al Bowlly and the American actress Tuesday Weld. They’re influenced by 1930s jazz, Serge Gainsbourg, Ennio Morricone and minimalist electronica and are known for a series of critically acclaimed albums, arts projects and award winning collaborations with film makers. We started spotting them on Paris DJs way back in 2005… and fast forward to 2012 we were glad to be able to interview Stephen last week (read it in english or in french), and managed to get a mix from him cooked especialy for Paris DJs. The Real Tuesday Weld has a new album out, Songs For The Last Werewolf, and Stephen Coates has also a new project and album out, Lazarus and The Plane Crash. We love his neo-retro 1930s/film noir soundtrack/Beatles vibe spiked with English humor, and can’t wait to see the band on stage very soon: February 13th at the Comedy Club and february 15th at the Café de La Danse, both in Paris!
Paris DJ’s
A widescreen cinematic emotional cabaret, Soundtrack for the Last Werewolf is the sixth The Real Tuesday Weld album and follows the Sunday Times and The Independent album of the week The London Book of the Dead. It’s been released by Six Degrees in the US on July 12th and internationally thereafter. It features a range of special guests including Glen Duncan, The Puppini Sisters, Pinkie Maclure and Joe Coles of Lazarus Plane Crash. A very special edition of the album with…..
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Interview with Stephen Coates
Stephen Coates (The Real Tuesday Weld)
(Interview by Nicolas Ragonneau for Paris Djs, january 2012)
Stephen Coates is a man of many masks, illusions and smoke-and-mirrors. Under his weird female pseudonym The Real Tuesday Weld he’s released impossible-to-classify records since the end of the Twentieth Century.
Read the full article here
Independent on Sunday – 4/5
The Independent Sunday 8 January 2012
Lazarus and the Plane Crash
Horseplay
by Simon Price
****
Lazarus and the Plane Crash is a project fronted by Joe Coles of defunct berserkers The Guillotines and Stephen Coates, aka The Real Tuesday Weld aka The Clerkenwell Kid. Horseplay, whose oversized packaging folds out into a Ouija board, is a peripatetic, eclectic magpie’s nest of styles, with Coles alternating between a badass Beef-heartian blues rasp and a more courtly Cole Porter diction, while Coates provides an alluring cut-and-past backing of vintage found sounds.
Independent on Saturday
The Independent Saturday 7 January 2012
Lazarus and the Plane Crash
Horseplay
Supposedly recorded in boozy singel takes, this “collision” between The Real Tuesday Weld’s Stephen Coates and the Guillotines’ Joe Coles is a lusty pile-up of bad-ass blues polkas. Subtle it isn’t, but the reckless racket is bracing and the mock-machowit (“I’m manly, I’m Desperate Danly!”) is leavening. The sleeve is a Ouija board, the noise within might just raise the dead.
Independent – 4/5
The Independent 6 January 2012
Lazarus and the Plane Crash
Horseplay
by Andy Gill
****
In their determination to go out on any limb, regardless of taste or safety, Lazarus and the Plane Crash – a collaboration between Guillotines singer Joe Coles and Stephen Coates, grey eminence behind The Real Tuesday Weld – display the kind of risk-taking absent from The Maccabees’ album. Coates stitches together jazz samples, wailing bluesharp, wheezing squeezebox and scarified guitar, while Coles leaps in with off the cuff vocals that test the boundaries of propriety, delivered in a snarling croak akin to Tom Waits. It’s the id-monster having a party, coming on outrageously to anything that walks, with no mind for civility and a healthy regard for mortatlity; “This fleshy cage, it’s all the rage/You dance around for a bit, then they chuck you in an earthy pit.”
Horseplay Digital Download
01 King of the Village Fete
02 Mating Dance
03 The Clays a Calling
04 Horn for the Whole Damn World
05 Violent Men
06 Naked and Nasty
07 Im Going Deaf
08 Nasty and Naked
09 Spring Heeled Jack
10 Two Frankfurters
11 My little Tiger
Lazarus and The Plane Crash’s ‘Horseplay’ is a collision between incendiary prime mover and vocalist Joe Coles of The Guillotines and producer The Clerkenwell Kid of The Real Tuesday Weld.
The Kid says: “These songs mix garage rock, gypsy jazz, cut-and-paste sampling, sexual over-excitement, violence and torch song pathos under spontaneous versifying. It was put together in a studio by the Thames rather like Doctor Frankenstein and Igor assembling a bricolage of musical body parts from borrowed bits and pieces. Joe would arrive, usually late, and tanked and cranked up after bad wine and tobacco, we’d pull the lever until the current arced across the room and the twitching started. Usually single takes and a subsequent laborious stitching process were all that were needed.”
Joe says: “The words to the songs were all written as they’re sung, its important to me that the sub-concious is allowed to puke out whatever it wants to and that is why I try to avoid a pen and paper. I believe a song should sing itself and any slow thinking that goes into the words will only weaken what’s trying to be expressed. There’s lots in these songs about sex, animals and about a wired, ecstatic feeling like a JG Ballard story, where the pilot of a stolen plane crashes into Shepperton and becomes this pagan demigod fucking everything and teaching the locals how to fly.”
To buy a limited edition album with Ouija board and instructions go here.
Uncut – 3/5
Uncut January 2012
Lazarus and The Plane Crash
Horseplay
by Peter Watts
***
Deranged gypsy pop meets Tom Waits on this oddball dark delight
Seemingly influenced evenly by Waits, black magic and The Cramps, this appealing curio features Joe Coles of The Guillotines working with The Clerkenwell Kid, producer of the kaleidoscopic The Real Tuesday Weld. It’s a suitably weird stew, mixing brothel creepers like “Two Frankfurters” with gypsy pop like “Mating Dance” and gleeful psychobilly brawlers like “Nasty And Naked” with Waitsian bawlers like “Violent Men”. The fact it is packaged in a simulacra of an Ouija board and references mythical London monster Spring-Heeled Jack only adds to the sense of bewildering charm.
The Top 5 Concept Albums of 2011
John Schaefer from NPR has listed The Last Werewolf as one of the top 5 concept Albums of 2011. Congratulations The Real Tuesday Weld!
Read the full article here
