Big Planet Scarey Planet
The Jazz Butcher
Mercury/Creation Records
BY TOM MEGGINSON
The Queen's Journal

Who listens to the Jazz Butcher? His music is just too damn poppy for the rockers, and too bizarre for the popsters to dig. Nobody appreciates amusing music anymore.

And who dances to the Jazz Butcher? He plays a guitar, all but passe in the computer age. He sings about political and personal concerns, and doesn't dwell on the standard dance lyrics "Jack", "Push it", or "Stroke it" to all points of the compass. Nobody dances to a human beat.

So who is this Butch anyway, and what is he trying to prove? Why does he dwell on sixties melodies and political stances in the generation of swine? The man talks about taking DRUGS openly in his lyrics, without a hint of irony or morality! Didn't anyone tell him to just say no? Appalling!

So who listens to the Jazz Butcher? Well, I for one think that he's gear as all hell. The Butcher has built his career on a asychedelic tongue-in-cheek approach to music and life that may be a bit hard for some people to handle. He's not afraid to whimsically mock such things as the tabloids, American culture, and meat. And his music has nothing to do with jazz; nothing at all.

The Butcher's style used to be in-definable. He played with every possible mutation of sixties pop, with some eighties fads thrown in. His albums would bounce from idiom to idiom, from folk melodies to demented rap, without any consistency or shame.

But earlier this year he released a cover of "Spooky" with definite dance intentions. It was set to an eighties dance beat, with eighties sampling included, but kept to a sixties melody and feel.

Now Butch has released an entire album of this new musical mongrel. Big Planet Scarey Planet is his most upbeat and consistent offering yet; it almost seems to be an effort by the Butcher to reach a wider audience, especially on the college radio charts. But it's still pretty strange.

Side one of Big Planet Searcy Planet is labelled "Big Side", and it consists mainly of songs with a big, lush, early Psychedelic Furs kind of sound. "New Invention", "Line Of Death", "Hysteria" and "The Word I Was Looking For are full of a lot of acoustic and electric guitar sounds, with the vocals mixed in at a very low level. The lyrics to these songs an uniformly dark, reflecting national disillusionment in the U.K. and the U.S.A., and the language that they share. These songs are guaranteed to astound your favorite stoner, when samples of obscure American dialogue and lots of cheap sixties vocal/guitar effects jump out at them from the mix.

The Butcher's new dance tune, "Do The Bubonic Plague", is on side two ("Seamy Side"). but it follows the same formula as the first four songs on the lust side. It's a little more danceable, and it features the kind of guitar playing you'd expect to hear in an old Spidennan cartoon The vocal samples in this tune are absolutely wild, but I won't spoil the surprise.

"Bicycle Kid", at the end of the Big Side, is another great new tune from the Butcher. It thumps along as he bitches about a delinquent little boy, calling him the "Dog-faced spawn of a working-class Tory". The song ends with the nasty lines, "Bicycle kid forget to wear a condom/Bicycle kid it's evolution in reverse!", as the Butcher's final verdict.

"Bad Dream Lover" is a beautiful bit of poetic irony about the love/hate obsession of a dejected lover. Lines such as "lf you'd let me keep your photograph I'd break it in two" portray these feelings beautifully. He talks about getting together with another girl, only to have his bad dream lover "come walking through the wall". He accuses her of being a supernatural curse, trying to ruin his life. It's a well-done bit of sentiment.

Big Planet Scarey Planet is probably the most accessible Jazz Butcher album yet. It has been a lot of fun to listen to so far, and maybe they'll play "Do The Bubonic Plague" at Alfie's some night. Or maybe we could get Butch himself to play Alf's at some future date— I hear that he runs a pretty cheap show.

So pick up this album if you're a fan of the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, or would like to be one. Then call your friendly QEA agent and request a show. Maybe there are more of you out there than I thought.

Big Planet, Scarey Planet

Early 1989 was, indeed a strange and desperate time after all that triumphalist Tory looting that had been going on. We listened to a lot of hip-hop and soul music at the time, and I think that we considered ourselves sufficiently HARD to take the whole fucker on in an l.p. Possibly with a more "clued-in" producer and a bit more self-discipline we could have come up with something like what we were looking for.

creation_records, Genius