The Real Tuesday Weld
It’s a lot to ask: Write songs about love, death, time and memory. Inform them with a narrative and musical sensibility at once intelligent, wry, witty, playful and profound. Be understated yet poetic, romantic yet post- modern, English yet universal. Admit your worst fears and failings, but remain charming and irresistably cool. Pay homage to heroes as far apart as Al Bowlly and Serge Gainsbourg, pass the sparkling style and champagne spirit of the '20s and '30s through a no-nonsense 21st century filter. Be accessible and sophisticated. And when you’ve written these songs, punctuate them with instrumental interludes to catch those of Psyche’s moods and Cupid’s moments language is apt to miss.
It’s a lot to ask. But, having been visited in a dream by the aforementioned Bowlly, one-man-industry The Real Tuesday Weld (a.k.a. Stephen Coates, a.k.a. The Clerkenwell Kid) has made it his working brief. Urban anatomist of love and sampler par excellence, The Real Tuesday Weld has honed a musical method of succinct composition and delivery ("antique beat", as he’s been wont to call it) that has the effect common to all nifty invention: it makes you wonder why no one’s done it before.