Although highly recommended by (inevitably) John Peel at the time, Wirral post-punk poet JEGSY DODD’S output has been largely overlooked by most except the faithful since his 1980s heyday.
So all credit to Geoff Davies at Probe Plus for re-introducing JD’s magnificent debut album ‘Winebars & Werewolves’ to the marketplace. It’s the core of this re-issue, and – along with the superb ‘The Jewel In The Flatcap’ EP – basically constitutes ‘The Probe Plus’ stuff, recorded between 1986 – 1988 and a vivid reminder of how desperate a place Merseyside was during those militant Thatcher-baiting days which this writer remembers all too well.
For the uninitiated (i.e most people below 35) Harry Cross was the fantastic, curmudgeonly git played by Bill Dean in long-running Scouse soap ‘Brookside’ and while he never got the headlines Mandy and Beth Jordache did for their patio burial scenario, the man himself once bought me a pint at a pub in Southport, so for Jegsy to name his backing group after him was and remains alright by me. Of the Sons, guitarist Ken Hancock has since gone on to further Scouse rock notoriety by grabbing the lead guitarist job in Half Man Half Biscuit made vacant when Simon Blackwell left the band in the mid-90s, while on the ‘Winebars & Werewolves’ album (1986), Dodd, Hancock, drummer Paul Spencer and bassist Ian Jackson were joined by Gone To Earth fiddler Dave Clarke, who makes his presence felt in no uncertain terms, adding a Levellers-style punk/folk collision aspect to the gritty musical backdrops the band set up for Jegsy’s biting, satirical delivery.
And most of ‘Winebars…’ is still a treat to this day. It’s a good mix of the hilarious and the deadly serious with Jegsy feeding off the variety of moods The Sons set up for him. Sometimes the mix is dense and gritty, like on the opening ‘So Here We Are’ or the dark and claustrophobic ‘No Place To Run’, with Clarke’s fiddle rising and lashing out like a Kraken awakening from the deep. Elsewhere, the loping, militant reggae groove of ‘Welcome To Hillview Heights’ is the perfect complement to Dodd’s address about the Wirral’s burgeoning drugs problem (“you shoulda stayed just smokin’ the weed/ ‘cos now you gotta steal and deal to feed the need”) and the incessant and sombre ‘The Art Of Rape’ recalls the mournful psychosis of PIL’S ‘Theme’ and features the most violent and dissonant violin scraping this side of King Of The Slums.
It’s not all hard going, of course. Dodd’s typically irrepressible Scouse humour often pokes through to the surface and tunes like ‘A Scouse Werewolf In London’ and ‘Winebar Mar’ are both musically perky and genuinely hilarious. The former finds out hero having a right old hairy time (“a beard like ZZ Top, sidies like a Ted”) while the medallion man shenanigans of ‘Winebar Man’ are all too easy to relate to, especially if you’re a victim of the dreadful ‘fun pub’ scene of the 1980s. The fact that Hancock and Clarke duke it out like a punkier Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick on this tune doesn’t exactly hurt either.
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Arguably, though, Dodd’s finest achievements come when he directs his lyrical dexterity towards the urban landscape of the Wirral. Both ‘Downtown Birkenhead’ and ‘Who Killed New Brighton?’ are no-holes-barred diatribes and both perfectly encapsulate the ‘no future’ era these boroughs lived through during the ‘80s. Both are excellent and only too credible, though perhaps Dodd’s two greatest tracks are reserved for the ‘Jewel In The Flatcap’ EP (1988). The EP’s lead track ‘Always The Bridesmaid’ is a supremely moody comment on Liverpool’s wasteland years set to remorseless, rolling drums and Hancock’s eerie guitar chime. Jegsy likens the city to a down-at-heel prostitute, but accurately predicts the city’s recent regeneration when he notes “the sleeping giant is gonna rise again.” It’s magnificent, but possibly eclipsed by the Falklands War commentary ‘8000 Miles Away’, where – with only Andy Holland’s distant harmonica for company – Jegsy stakes his claim for greatness with a broadside that usurps both ‘Shipbuilding’ and New Model Army’s ‘Spirit Of The Falklands’ in terms of depth of feeling. It is – without question – Dodd’s masterpiece.
Jegsy finally came in from the creative cold with last year’s ‘Wake Up And Smell The Offy’ album and a new backing group, The Original Sinners, so – with any luck – there may still be a lot more due where this comes from. ‘The Probe Plus Stuff’, though, is still the Jegsy Dodd motherlode, and if you thought John Cooper Clarke was the undisputed post-punk poet, well you might just need to reconsider after hearing this.
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