Having spent two and a half years between blog posts wandering around looking for my lost memory - and honestly this is true, and of course I wish I'd thought of the canoe thing first, if only to bring fame of a kind - there are many, many gems that surely merited a mention in these never-read pages but which have since sunk to the bottom of the record stacks. This is one such that came out earlier this year, got played a lot as a 7" and duly downloaded too - not many justify this doubling - and then got lost beneath the next 500 or so singles that came along. Until for some reason recently, when I was putting together a slew of CDs for people who enjoy receiving them far less than I enjoy making them, and this simply insisted on being on every one. Perhaps this was inspired by some recent, uncharacteristic rock and roll behaviour of my own, involving extreme drunkenness, my head and a plate glass window, from which I emerged miraculously unscathed, barring a few minor cuts and bruises (but hey, you should have seen the window).
You can do a rock and roll points test on the Filthy Pedro website, by the way. I scored a creditable 20 rock and roll points.
Anyway, this is knockabout, smile-inducing, life-affirming stuff. If something in this doesn't bring a grin to your face then it's possible you're already dead. Every rock and roll cliche is distilled into something a little over three minutes long - feel free to tick them off your own personal bingo card as appropriate - and after this there's surely no need for a publication like the NME which celebrates these cliches every week afresh. This guy has nailed it, and all to an endearingly ramshackle, low-fi tune with a suitably rough-hewn delivery. A few years ago we all pretended to like 'anti-folk', but apart from the evergreen Jeffrey Lewis, it was never as much fun as this. Another comparison I've seen is with Camper Van Beethoven, but they surely only ever managed one good song, Take the Skinheads Bowling, whereas Filthy clearly has at least two, as the b side, which combines history and sex in a winning way, attests.
You can buy this stuff from his website, and clearly you should. Still here?
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