A half hearted attempt to review the live work of thirty-five years of Welsh Rockers Man on their latest release ‘Man Alive.’
Gathered by Mott The Dog
Reaped by Ella Crew
5
Stars *****
Over the last thirty-five years, the goodly folk of Swansea,
Wales, have been trying to let the world know about their favorite sons
‘Man’, which have mostly fallen on deaf ears. That is all the more
remarkable as they really are very good. They are never backwards about coming
forward or hiding their light under a bushel. Oh yes, there have been other
singers and bands from Wales. Tom Jones and Charlotte Church have flexed their
mighty Welsh throats to applause from every nook and cranny the world has to
offer. That great flying heavy metal thunder of “Budgie” once ruled the
waves, whilst “The Stereophonics” and “The Manic Street Preachers”
often charged up the charts. But one feels they aren’t quite as truly Welsh
as the sons of Mrs. Jones, Leonard, Williams, Ace, Ryan, and all.
Not that these Welsh musical wizards haven’t dashed up the
album charts on both sides of the Atlantic themselves, one just feels that
perhaps they haven’t really been given the full acclaim that they deserve.
Maybe there are some obvious reasons for this quick change of personnel as they
definitely make Spinal Tap look like a conservative and stable lineup. All
bands have their influences, but Man seem to have absorbed more than most, with
sometimes consecutive tracks on one studio album sounding like a totally
different band. It is always rock music, but varying from Space/Rock to Heavy
Metal.
This collection starts in 1972 with the guitar and vocals of
Mick Jones and Deke Leonard joined on stage by bassist Ace Martin and drummer
Terry Williams at the Roundhouse in London. It was a benefit concert for the
hippie charity group Greasy Truckers in what many would claim to be the
ultimate Man track ‘Spunk Rock’. In its original studio incarnation it was
six minutes long, but here we get the fully improvised twenty-two minutes. One
can only wonder how long this track would have been, had they not been faded
out after the song had been going on for quite some time. Wonderful stuff all
the same. Deke Leonard and Mick Jones vocals and guitars swoop in and out of
the song. The guitar notes fly out like raindrops, either splashing onto the
audience with the venom of Thor with his mighty axe, or reaching out with the
caress of a kiss. In today’s live set Spunk Rock is normally held back to be
given a real dusting up as the encore.
But Man being Man, within a year Leonard and Ace had been
unceremoniously dumped out of the band (don’t worry, they will both be back)
to be replaced by Phil Ryan on keyboards, Will Youatt on bass, and returning
founder member Clive John on guitar. This lineup came up with the classic Man
album ‘Be Good to Yourself At Least Once A Day’. The album had only four
tracks, but was still over forty minutes long. We get three live versions of
these songs on this collection.
‘Life On The Road’ is literally a tale of the woes of
life on the road, with its Wishbone Ash dual lead guitar sound and finishing
with both guitars wailing away like police sirens. Through the years Man were
no strangers to the long arm of the law, but our heroes usually managed to
scamper away in time.
You also get the song from the same concert at London’s
rainbow theatre ‘C’mon’, which would be a delight to any Pink Floyd fan,
and ‘Bananas’, which has to be one of the funniest rock songs ever written.
The later two songs are still required hearing at any Man concert today. Even
though Deke Leonard was not in at the recording of these classic Man songs, he
has been playing them live on and off for thirty years. His unbiased opinion
cleverly uttered with the words: “When you go to a restaurant you expect to
find your favorite dish on the menu”.
As if to even things up we then jump forward in time to 1999
to finish the first disc of this set with a version of 7171 551 recorded by and
released on one of Deke Leonard’s solo albums, “Iceberg”, when he was on
one of his sabbaticals from the band in the early seventies. There are only
five songs on this first disc, but it still times in at over seventy-two
minutes.
Disc two contains ten songs from 1975 to 1999, including
three tunes from their triumphant return to the stage for the Glastonbury
festival in 1994. It starts off with the two minutes thirty seconds Man boogie
‘Hard Way To Live’, includes the highly charged ‘Romain’, the violent
story of a certain officer’s dealing with Martin Ace, and finishes with the
ten minutes of Glastonbury set closer, the epic ‘The Ride and The View’.
For anybody wondering what the fuss was about from these
boys from the valleys, this set, ‘Man Alive’, makes a marvelous starting
point for the ears. For those of you who would like to know a bit more about
the origins of Man, look no further than Deke Leonard’s autobiography
“Rhinos, Winos, and Lunatics”, the story of a rock ‘n’ roll band. Never
has the field of rock ‘n’ roll been so candidly exposed or comically told.
Because of the constantly changing lineup of Man, it is
impossible to list all the musicians that played on these two CD sets of
recordings. I doubt whether even the players themselves know for sure who was
there and who wasn’t, especially in the turbulent seventies. But Mott’s
Dream Man Band would be…
Micky Jones - Lead Guitar and Vocals
Deke Leonard - Lead Guitar and Vocals
Martin Ace - Bass and vocals
Phil Ryan – Organ
Terry Williams – Drums
Guest Appearance for Spunk Rock, the late great John Cipollina - Lead Guitar
Songs
Disc One
Spunk Rock
C’mon
Bananas
Life On The Road
7171551
Disc Two
Hard Way To Live
Day And Night
Hard Way To Die
Many Are Called But Few Get Up
Welsh Connection
Kerosene
Romain
Even Visionaries Go Blind
Chinese Cut
The Ride And The View
To contact Mott the Dog
email: review@mott-the-dog.com
Bangkok
Inside Out was co-authored by Daniel Ziv (a seasoned peripatetic) and Guy
Sharett who has managed to sit still long enough to put down some roots in
Bangkok. It was released in 2005 (Equinox Publishing, ISBN 979-97964-6-6) and
printed in Thailand.