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It doesn’t get more evocative than this collection of songs. Four geezers from Oxford who recorded the whole lot in a day and apparently thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process.

There’s no pretentiousness, no pandering to a more instrument-heavy, commercial sound, no focus-group vetted melodies, no airbrushed “Celticism”, just a collection of authentic-sounding, working songs from the sea, some pretty, some gritty.

The tunefullness of many of the tracks belies the fact that most of the men who originally sung songs such as these were as hard as nails. It’s clear from the surviving stories that on wooden-hulled, ocean going, sailing vessels you had to be incredibly tough to survive.

Despite the toe-tapping nature of some of the tunes, their heritage and evocative nature makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and I get a rush of pride at hailing from a seafaring nation.

Support a worthy cause, get a copy of the CD for yourself and one as a birthday present for a friend.

Sea Shanties

“In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n'roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n'roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.” J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology, from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits

The Cramps were one of my favourite bands when I was in my mid to late teens. They were pretty out there, as this footage from a gig they played at the Napa Vally Mental Hospital in California in 1978 attests. (Oh don’t look at me like that, they used to call such places by such names back then.)

“The Way I Walk” was one of my favourite Cramps songs and was on the 12″ EP referred to above (which I still have somewhere, in an old archive box).

http://youtube.com/watch?v=n5OMuj4FpII

Edit: Here’s another another Cramps video (there’s no shortage of them on YouTube), check out Lux Interior’s gravity-defying “hipsters”: Tear it Up.