[boc-l] OFF: Larry Wallis, review and RIP

[Jonathan Jarrett]

 	Dear all,
 		  a little while back, I finally got hold of a copy of 
the 2001 solo album of Larry Wallis, ex-Pink Fairies, Motörhead, UFO and 
quite a few Hawk-related bands, _Death in the Guitarfternoon_. Despite the 
dreadful title, it has had me grinning for much of the last two days; the 
man's famous guitar is all over it and even if his backing band is able 
but not exactly innovative and some of the vocals were beyond his slightly 
wrecked rebel yell, it's still very much of what I hoped for right from 
the excellent first track.

 	That first track, 'Are We Having Fun Yet?', is one of several that 
refer back to Wallis's musical past, with the multi-layer soloing of some 
of his early Fairies work and a title that echoes the 'When's the Fun 
Begin?' of that era, but now lyrically set in an off-planet back-to-back 
and asking the question of the whole future species. A couple of the 
others are just straightforward rerecordings of his older songs--the 
version of 'Police Car' here is probably only his second best but still 
pretty good--and the last one, 'Screw It', is, how to put it? A negative 
musical tribute to a previous band-mate, sung deep from the heart. Some of 
the rest hovers lyrically around a kind of zombie cowboy æsthetic that 
is also where the artwork largely hangs out, along with some expressive 
sleeve-notes by the man himself. But though some of the music is simpler 
than other bits, it's all the real stuff and I wish I'd got it years ago.

 	That last is especially true because, while Googling 
enthusiastically around it rather than write another tedious reading list, 
I found out that Larry Wallis died in September last year. I nearly got to 
see him, but then he cancelled the tour because of a trapped nerve in his 
back; now I never will see him, and it's getting harder in general to 
Google one of that big generation of 70s rockers without feeling like I 
accidentally brought news of their death out of the Internet. But in this 
case, at least I can have shouted about him a bit here where people might 
care. For anyone reading to whom he might be new, here's the first track 
on Bandcamp:
https://larrywallis.bandcamp.com/music
and here's a fabulous interview from just after the album came out:
https://www.furious.com/perfect/larrywallis.html
Anyway, hope you're all well and safe out there, yours,
 							Jon

ObCD: Steve Hillage - _Green_ remaster
-- 
        Jonathan Jarrett, Keighley and University of Leeds
     "Says not the Wise One, `When two men cannot agree over
      the price of an onion, who shall decide what happened
     in the time of Yu?'" (Kai Lung, reported by Ernest Bramah)