Cracker – Kerosene Hat

Collectively Chameleon

And now for the album itself – not one of the greats for me – yet in the early 90s this had enough heaviness to become a part of the rock renaissance I have been writing about recently: but it is more punk than grunge, the opening three tracks, including single Low, leaning loosely to the former.

What really appealed was the title track, a languid narrative with one of those obtuse storylines that pulls you into its uncertain depths, the guitar lick providing a balladic rock anchor,

How can I fly with these old doggy wings

While the magpie sings some shiny song?

Old corn face, row of teeth

She says sweetly to me in the elevator

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

Here come old Kerosene Hat

With his ear flaps waxed, a-courting his girl

Come clattering in here on your old cloven skates

With that devilish spoon

Everything seems like a dream

And life's a scream

When you're submarine

So don't you bother me, death

With your leathery ways and your old chaise lounge

Wickerman's fence of leathery tyres

And the cook's gone bad, started several fires

Everything seems like a dream

When you're submarine

Head like a stream, she says softly to me

From the rattling chair

"Bring me a steak and my old pair of crows

My medicine lamp"

Everything seems like a dream

So life's a scream

This is followed by another folkrock song Take Me Down To The Infirmary with more lyrical as well as musical echoes of the past, here sounding like the Stones, if only marginally. Sweet Potato has the most rock street cred on the album, again aping TRS, if only partially. I Want Everything is an internal echo of Take Me Down... and reminds of Tom Petty, whilst Lonesome Johnny Blues further establishes its 70s qualifications as a countryrock outing with fiddle and pedal steel cameos. The poles of this album are reflected in tracks eleven and twelve, respectively punk pace in Let’s Go For A Ride and storytelling ballad in Loser, and it is this chameleon collectivism from a past sound that attracted particularly at the time, and entertains though doesn’t grip and hold tight today.

Taking The Biscuit

Coincidence and fortuity are natural phenomena, and in the way these things occur – by surprise – both did so today.

A good friend rang this morning to chew the proverbial, but he also talked about having just bought another Cracker album, a recent one, and he enthused about their '93 album Kerosene Hat, at which point I talked about the coincidence of only yesterday writing about influential and rejuvenating rock bands of the early 90s, of which KH would be a solid representative.

So a little later, and only a few moments ago, I decided to research that album and the band's first eponymous one which I don’t know that well. When typing ‘cracker’ into a search engine it is no surprise that the foodstuff rather than band came top of the list [along with the TV programme....]. What also got presented was the ‘graham’ cracker: search engines being clever in their plethora of prediction and suggestion. Now for years – not consistently throughout the full 45 I have lived in England – I have had occasion to refer to and then need to explain to people here exactly what a graham cracker is. My memory of such is as a child in America and being given these with a glass of milk at nursery or kindergarten school. I know we also used to have them at home and I loved them, as kids do, because they were sweet. But I have always wondered why you couldn’t get them here, and why the only English cracker was what we called a ‘soda’ cracker in the States.

graham

Well, praise be to research, and the apocalyptic moment that has taken all of 45 years – though, as I say, not a daily intense search and scrutiny for the answer – but I discovered just a short while ago that the English equivalent to the graham cracker is of course [drum roll] the digestive biscuit!

digestive

Fucking simple, when you think about it.

For 45 years, what should have been the easiest of extrapolations has been thwarted by the difference in nomenclature – graham rather than digestive; cracker rather than biscuit - and the simpler difference in shape – rectangular rather than circular.  A fortuitous discovery, if ridiculously belated, but I am enlightened, and relieved.

More on the band later.