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 – 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
Horseplay Album & Ouija Board
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 limited edition CD designed by Catherine Anyango, comes with its own operational Ouija board, Planchet and instructions.
Use at your discretion. We have been using it to work out what will happen to the music industry and it has told us that Joe Coles will become a star..
If you want to see why and are in London, join us at the album launch on January 14th.
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.”
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