Caught in the Carousel

MAKING MOVIES: The Real Tuesday Weld's Consummate Top Tens

By David Porter

The Real Tuesday Weld is the nom d' plume of musical alchemist, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and devoted Londoner Stephen Coates. The London Book of the Dead, his third release for independent San Francisco label Six Degrees Records, is one of the best albums of 2007.

Described by The New Yorker back in 2004 as "an English-speaking Serge Gainsbourg rolling around Tin Pan Alley with synthesizer in hand," Coates studied visual art at the Royal Academy of Art in London, departing from the Academy in 1997. According to Coates, he was visited at the time in a pair of dreams by American film star Tuesday Weld and by English music hall singer Al Bowlly, the latter killed during an air raid over London at the beginning of World War II.

How best to describe the sound of the Real Tuesday Weld? It's a cocktail of Thirties and Forties American and British big band and dance hall music blended with chanson, spiked with Sixties film scores and finished with the sparkling British pop of the 1980s, lush as an evening at the Ritz, posh as the lounge on a transatlantic Pan Am flight and retooled for our digital century. Coates constructs his songs with bits and loops, strings and vocal effects, French lyrics and accordions and horns, but their foundations are melodies as simple and elegant as Nat King Cole's "But Beautiful" from The Very Thought of You or Ella Fitzgerald's playful "If I Were A Bell" from Ella Swings Lightly, as bright and shiny as anything recorded in Britain in the Eighties. Play The London Book of the Dead, and you'll hear cocktail piano, Andrews Sisters vocals and "Kix," a revision of Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick out of You." "Banjo, kazoo, potato peeler, you name it — I'll stick anything in," Coates says. Even at their most intricate, Coates's sonic collages are thick with lovely, haunting hooks and infective refrains. This is sophisticated pop music, British to its core, and painterly and precise, crafted by a musician in love with music; it's impossible not to fall for his efforts.

Coates has wedded his ardor for literature to his love for music. His first LP for Six Degrees Records, I, Lucifer (2004), is the "soundtrack" to Glen Duncan's 2002 novel of the same name, the story of the Devil's occupation of the body of an English writer — flat in Clerkenwell, soul in Limbo — as part of a deal to perhaps return to Heaven (Coates and Duncan were flatmates for a time, and Gunn thanks Coates in his acknowledgements for "musical companionship"). The London Book of the Dead features "Dorothy Parker Blue" and a sample of William Blake's poem, "London," while the album's title references The Tibetan Book of the Dead, described in Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia as follows:

"A Tibetan account of the preparation of a dying soul for the forty-nine days to be spent in an intermediate state. It embodies a view of life after death that the psychologist C.G. Jung saw as a reflection of the racial unconscious. It gained some notoriety because its descriptions of the intermediate state compare closely with visions induced by hallucinogenic drugs."

"I thought it would be funny if there were a book like that for the English," Coates says. "The album felt like that to me — a way of moving from one state to another, and all set against the backdrop of this city. Last year I became a father, and then two weeks later my own father died. So I was in this kind of psychic spin between birth and death, and this album came out of that in some way."

Like literature, cinema is a crucial element in Coates's work. In "Ruth, Roses and Revolvers" from The London Book of the Dead, Coates sings, "let's make a film/it'll be such fun/all you need's a girl and a gun, apparently/we'll pump it full of art and sex…" On the cover of The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid (2005), the second Real Tuesday Weld LP, Coates appears carrying a reel of film. The disc itself is printed to look like that same reel of film, and the gatefold features staged black and white photographs of Coates — armed with a pistol in three of them — designed to look like film stills. While the cinematic references aren't as obvious on I, Lucifer, throughout much of the novel Satan is writing a screen treatment of the story of his expulsion from Heaven and trying to sell it to Hollywood. The Real Tuesday Weld albums are like Wes Anderson movies, jewel boxes filled with bright colors and dreamy moods. The devil is, of course, in the details.

This is pop music in the vein of early Beatles records, Blossom Dearie, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and Prefab Sprout — immediate and dulcet. Listen to these wonderful records repeatedly, and you'll hear bits of Burt Bacharach, Thomas Dolby, Baxter Dury, Jellyfish, Pink Floyd, PM Dawn, Elliott Smith, Spandau Ballet, the Velvet Underground and Frank Sinatra, especially his work with Tommy Dorsey and for Columbia Records in the Forties. You will be delighted.

Mr. Coates has been extremely generous with Caught in the Carousel, and he left a pile of Consummate Top Ten lists (four, count ‘em!) under our Douglas fir — we can't thank him enough. Enjoy, and pick up a copy of The London Book of the Dead. It's pure pop for now people. From way back.

THE REAL TUESDAY WELD CONSUMMATE TOP TENS!

LONDON DANCE BAND LEADERS
Harry Roy (groovy)
Roy Fox (cool)
Henry Hall (uptight)
Carroll Gibbons (smooth)
Joe loss (mellow)
Jack Hylton (twitchy)
Bert Ambrose (sophisticated)
Ray Noble (just ok)
Jack Jackson (skippy)

BOOKS ABOUT LONDON
London: A Biography: Peter Ackroyd ('nuff said)
Underground London: Stephen Smith (well, who'd have thought it?)
The Secret Rivers of London: Nicholas Barton (I was obsessed with this for years)
The London Monster: Jan Bondeson (I know several candidates for this title)
The Clerkenwell Tales: Peter Ackroyd (weird and wonderful)
London: The Wicked City: Fergus Linnane (there's nothing new under the sun)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris: Suzannah Clarke (Ok, it's fiction, but it does the trick)
The Quincunx: Charles Pallister (likewise)
Prisons and Punishments of London: Richard Byrne (I went straight after reading this)
London, An Anthology: A.N.Wilson (A city of a book)

FILMS SET IN LONDON
The Long Good Friday (being small, fat and bald can be cool)
Underground (this was made in 1928 and not much has changed on the northern line)
V for Vendetta (bad reviews, but it's cool)
Brazil (well, kind of)
The Lavender Hill Mob (very silly, very funny)
Alfie (the original, not that piece of shit with Jude Law)
Pennies from Heaven (the TV series, not that piece of shit with Steve Martin)
1984 (just gets better)
Passport to Pimlico (camp, ludicrous, innocent)
Naked (vicious, tragic, cynical)

LONDON STREETS
Fournier Street (Gilbert and George and company)
Lambs Conduit Street (went wrestling there once)
Clerkenwell Road (walked it everyday for years)
Roupell Street (i'd like to live here)
Britten Street (home of the Jerusalem Tavern - nicest pub in London)
Lower Marsh (best kept secret)
CecilCourt (if you love books, you'll be in heaven all day)
Bonnington Square (hippie and cool for it)
Clink Street (saw a ghost here once)
Lincoln's Inn Fields (kissed somebody I didn't know and never saw 'em again)

DISCOGRAPHY

EP
The Meteorology Of Love (1999)
Valentine (2000)
L'Amour et La Morte (2001)

LP
When Psyche Meets Cupid (2001)
At the House of the Clerkenwell Kid (2002)
I, Lucifer (2004)
The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid (2005)
The London Book of the Dead (2007)

INTERNET
www.tuesdayweld.com
www.theclerkenwellkid.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/therealtuesdayweld
www.sixdegreesrecords.com