”Hang no picture on the wall
”Burn no lantern light to guide you through
”The failures and the falls”
Blyth Power get dubbed punk folk or sometimes anarcho-folk, but neither tag come close to covering it. Their mission statement gets closer - “a cross between The Clash, Steeleye Span and The Rubettes.” But the best bands all sound just like themselves, operating in a peer group of one. The Fall just sound like the Fall. Current 93 just sound like Current 93. The Magic Band just sound like the Magic Band. And Blyth Power just sound like Blyth Power. That’s it.
Except you’ve got to measure them against someone or this isn’t going to work. So let’s set up a compare and contrast…
Like the Waterboys, Blyth Power have revolved around one constant member - Joseph Porter - and exist as an outlet for his songwriting. Both came out of punk, retaining the self-reliant ethic but swapping its quick-fire sound and spraycan immediacy for the expansive. They come self-described as “epic… colourful… crashing…. impassioned”. Like the Waterboys they matched evocative lyrics to mighty-sounding music, song verging on a form of landscape painting.
Just compare…
”There's a black wind blowing
”A typhoon on the rise
”Pummelin' rain
”Murderous skies!”
…to…
”I'm gone to the moss now
”Packed my saddle bag as hard as I was able
”I turned in to the wind and slipped my cable”
(And they could both wax lyrical on the curative properties of trains, but that’s a tale for another time.)
But really, the comparison is there just to set up the contrast. First, the Waterboys were expansive through and through. Blyth Power sounded epic but at the same time extemporised, cottage industry, indie in the positive sense. (They very nearly called an album ‘Make Do And Mend’.)
Bill Drummond once said he saw the Teardrop Explodes “as a battered Second World War bomber heading back home across the Channel… [they] keep going, chugging away. And they’ll always make it back”. But the comment’s perhaps truer still of Blyth Power.
Waterboys songs were full of exploits, noble-jawed heroes throwing scarves around their throats as they set off on richly symbolic journeys. Despite - or more likely because of - Porter’s previous with the anarcho-punk scene, Blyth Power songs were characterised by misadventures. And populated by headstrong fools, black-hearted rogues, worm-tongued turncoats and malevolent tricksters. Normally in that order. The persistence of human folly was a prevalent theme of Porter’s.
So if both took a chess move from punk, Blyth Power’s was the greater turn. The Waterboys’ was a Rook’s move, taking themselves off to quite another section of the board. Blyth Power’s was a Knight’s move, a tangent from where they’d been before.
The Waterboys impassioned-self, first-person vocals retained a stretched kind of connection to the source. “I will put my soul and will to the test” isn’t so far from “for once in my life I’ve got something to say”. Porter’s vocals were more like the sardonic, omnipotent narrator of a farce.
So this time let’s contrast…
“Well I will not sleep
“And I will not rest
“I will put my soul
“And my will to the test”
…to…
“When I withheld from the rich what I stole from the poor
”I soon the inside of the citadel saw”
And as those lines might suggest Porter was possessed of wry humour, and much of the band’s appeal was hearing such a pumping, anthemic form being given such acerbic content. It’s like hearing a heckle delivered as if it’s a speech. Many a track sought to expose the tawdry truth beneath those grand and much-retold legends of yore. (For example ’After the Horse Has Bolted’.)
His lyrics also delighted in jarring anachronisms, where marching Crimean armies would segue into unanswered answerphone messages. Characters recurred across songs and down the ages - Jack, Shift, McArthur. Or the same situation is shown to repeat down the line, surely the worldview of a cynic in distilled form. To misquote Marx history just keeps repeating, and every time it’s a farce. Time is the parade of one damned fool after another, slipping up on the same banana skin until the stars go out.
Though he never seemed sure whether the greatest act of folly in Blyth Power’s world wasn’t Blyth Power themselves. Porter described the track ‘God’s Orders’ as “not about Templars at all, [but] about being in Blyth Power. What do you mean you're impervious to metaphor?”
But this metaphor-as-metafiction was at it’s height with the numerous numbers which dealt with the protracted siege of Troy and the legendary wooden horse. (Frequently described by Porter as “a really, really stupid plan.”) To the point where the title of the live video, ‘Do the One About the Horse’, could be an in-joke.
That silly shaped, splinter-inducing wooden box came to represent a group packed together on a transit van slowly traversing the M4, pressed up against one another’s bad jokes and armpits, keen to spring the doors and do the gig just to escape this torment.
And just as characters are always reappearing and time keeps getting tangled, the Blyth Power chronology is itself jumbled. Songs appear only to get re-recorded years later, on one occasion a whole album. This was largely by necessity, as fly-by-night labels came and went. (Much to Porter’s open dissatisfaction.) But even though it’s made much of the music hard to track down, it also feels fitting. Nothing Blyth Power-related takes place in linear time.
Was everything grand on the good ship? Well the band’s Achilles heel, to use an appropriately Classical metaphor, was their penchant for pastiche songs. About one song per album of Porter putting on a funny voice was sufficient. He once said himself that an early number “sounds more like a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan.” And too often the magic blend of the Clash, Steeleye Span and the Rubettes was replaced by… well, I suppose I’ve given it away now.
Their third album (depending how you count it), 1989’s ‘Alynwick and Tyne’, marks the point where Blyth Power shook off punk and truly became Blyth Power. The importance of incorporating female backing vocals could not be overstated, they really weren’t kidding about that Rubettes influence. And so it makes for a good jumping-on point.
Though listen to it on-line but don’t expect to be able to buy a copy. Porter has said “This won't be re-released until the suit holding the copyright decides it's profitable. Some claim home taping is killing music, but it's not the only thing.” Still, the later album ‘Out From Under the King’ is almost as good. Actually, that’s hard to get hold of too… look, just start where you can, okay? It’s hard to go wrong.
But if you want a taster before you take a dip, ’Inside The Horse’ is not atypically an anti-anthem, an avowal of unbelonging delivered as a rousing singalong….
”If we lose face we will still have others left
”To rescue and restore
”All the wits we left behind us…
”…inside the horse!”
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