Jazz Butcher
Draining The Glass (Nectar Masters)
by Patrick Smith
Underground rock’s greatest shame, and there have been a few, is its perennial neglect of Britain’s Jazz Butcher, Patrick Fish, a remarkable songwriter who deserves a far better fate than the bargain bin at Tower or the dreaded, unalphabetized cheapo rack near the bag check desk. A hallowed list would be the names and addresses of all fifteen people who bothered to show up at Nightstage in 1992, or the Paradise in ’87.
At once quirky and sobering, from lounge music and drinking songs to feedback-laced explosions and textured ballads, the Butcher has defied categorization ever since the quietly acclaimed and long-forgotten A Scandal in Bohemia, which surfaced all too briefly in the early 1980s. A neglected batch of gems were to follow – Distressed Gentlefolk, Fishcotheque, Cult of the Basement – a vast discography that continues equally without due praise into the 1990s. Our most recent treat was last summer’s Illuminate, which received minimal exposure on playlists heavy with big-label attitude rock.
Mr. Fish himself has taken the trouble to compile Draining the Glass, which is a brave retrospective culled from his five year span with the UK’s Glass Records, a relationship that gave us five full-length albums including the masterpiece Bloody Nonsense, from which we get about half of Draining’s twenty tracks. Some of this stuff has never been available in the compact disc format, or at best is impossible t to find, and it’s something like religion to hear the brilliant capriciousness of “Southern Mark Smith” and “Just Like Betty Page” in digital clarity (from the analogue, of course) for the first time.
The Butcher’s essence is a punky, lighthearted recklessness kept in check by lush, cushiony underpinnings, of which dirty-pop classics “Girlfriend” and “Big Saturday” are irresistible examples. And that’s David J, yeah the same of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets fame, playing and singing backup. Meanwhile, never one to take himself too seriously, titles like “Girls Who Keep Goldfish” and “The Jazz Butcher Meets Count Dracula” weave a deceptive whimsy through the work of a true master craftsman. “Goldfish are silent,” sings Pat, “Under the water… But girls who keep goldfish are sometimes quite loud.” Don’t let it distract you, there’s some mighty graceful musicianship under the superficial silliness, an acoustic irony balancing somewhere between beauty and hilarity.
Today Fish and his band sit idle, and sources say he’s ready to dump the adopted moniker for an entirely new project. Always just aloof enough to preclude any wide-scale attraction – nobody hears the praise, apparently, from the likes of Mark E. Smith, Tom Waits, and even REM – the Butcher sits on the verge of pop oblivion, much the way a certain band starring Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker did so many years ago. And we all know what happened to them. Time will tell, but surely this disc is a step in the right direction.
