Brown's Around July 05 - The Joy of Snacks
It's Good News Time for music lovers in this part of the world as Pitlochry Festival Theatre once again presents its series of Sunday Concerts and Foyer Events over the summer months. August brings the return of the hugely entertaining Beyond Broadway show and the incomparable Humphrey Lyttelton, not forgetting Scotland's answer to the Two Ronnies, Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham, but this month I'd like to tell you about a band who combine musical excellence and humour in a stage show that defies description.
On Sunday 17 July it's step forward King Pleasure and The Biscuit Boys. When I reveal the names of the band members as King Pleasure himself on vocals, tenor and baritone sax; Boysie Battrum on tenor and alto sax; Crab-Claw Tromans on, natch, piano; Bullmoose K Shirley on guitar; Shark Van Schtoop on double bass and Dangerous Dave Wilkes (surely that can't be his real name) on drums, you'll have an idea that music of the po-faced variety might just have left by the fire escape.
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The band began in the early 1980s in the well-known and revered Blues delta of Walsall when a group of school pals sat in a coffee bar and decided to form a rhythm and blues band. They went about the task in a slightly offbeat way by deciding which member would play which instrument before going out to buy them and learn to play!
By 1986 they were operating under the name of Some Like It Hot and busking on the streets of Walsall. A busking competition in Birmingham brought success and a prize of £100 plus a few gigs at the Birmingham Jazz Festival. Fast forward with me now to 1987 and a name change to The Satellites, followed by another name change to the present King Pleasure and The Biscuit Boys.
In the interests of saving time spent on keystrokes, I shall refer to the band as the KPs from now on, and it's a feature of their story that there's a great deal of true/false? about just what they did and didn't do. Their first LP, released in 1988, was in mono, and bore the legend "These tracks have not previously been released on long-playing record", while the recording studio was credited as 'Outlaw Studios, Wm'. Could that by Wyoming? No; try 'West Midlands'. The sleevenote was full of references to territory bands and legendary sessions in the Mid-West, but despite the evocation of the 1940s, the average age of the band at the time was about 21.
Several years on, and having run through a selection of members with such registrar-scaring names as Piano-Man Skan, Lisa 'Sugar' Lee and Ivory Dan McCormack, the KPs have retained their central core with the band operating as a co-operative and democratic unit. Some of the members have been known to attend band meetings!
Joking aside (why?), this is a band that can play. They've gigged in San José, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Washington, climaxing with four sell-out shows at Dan Ackroyd's House Of Blues in Boston.
So what will the burghers of Pitlochry and environs discover on Sunday 17 July? Hmmm. There's no denying the KPs' popularity, their polish and the ability to assault, involve and ultimately exhaust an audience, but, some would say, that doesn't make them a good jazz band ... or even a jazz band. Others might argue that the border between jazz and blues has plenty of traffic crossing it. It's very much a visual as well as musical act and some jazz purists might find it difficult to accept a diminutive bass player who somehow plays the instrument wonderfully while taking it to two submissions or a knock-out. Think of the portly Mr Waller, for one, and you'll understand that humour has an honourable place in the story of jazz.
The City Limits reviewer referred to the KPs as "a respected R&B combo whose levity makes a welcome respite to the knit-brows ploughing the furrows of authenticity." Darn, wish I'd said that (you will, Oscar, you will .) and Dave Clarke in Now Dig This said "Superb, a stunning range of instrumental ability ... classy stuff in the style of Louis Jordan and Eddie Cleanhead Vinson, with nowt taken out! A band I'd recommend ANYBODY to go and see."
It sounds like a fun evening with lots of the real music thrown in. These guys have thousands of shows and numerous albums under their crown and have enjoyed huge critical acclaim from both the press and their many fans worldwide. Don't miss them!
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