Kevin Coyne
“I don’t think it’s a put-down to say that a white kid can’t sing black man’s music,” former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman recently told the Oxford American. “I don’t think it applies. You can usually see that, if you go to both shows, you prefer the black man’s version….But if you really love the music, you can get pretty close and you can do it your way–you don’t do it their way.”
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Kevin Coyne–who plays at Lounge Ax on Saturday–may be the only British musician who ever really had the blues. He emerged in the 60s as the front man for Siren, a Chicago-style blues group that recorded for Dandelion, the label run by BBC disc jockey John Peel. Siren was a mere twig on the family tree that produced the Stones and their ilk, but Coyne’s plaintive nasal wail didn’t go completely unappreciated: in 1971, mere days after Jim Morrison croaked in a Parisian bathtub, Coyne got a call from Elektra suggesting he might make a good front man for the Doors. He passed up this dubious opportunity and instead went on to cut his first solo album, Case History, for Dandelion.
In some singers’ hands, such intensely specific angst can come across as overwrought, self-indulgent, or even silly, but Coyne’s obvious identification with the people in his songs, along with his peculiarly theatrical delivery, makes for some devastating performances. Yet only a handful of his 30-some albums are available, and ironically his biggest audience is in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland–what he affectionately calls “the Bavarian market”–where he’s not sure fans completely understand either the lyrics or the music. “There’s a lot of subtleties and nuances that they miss, you know,” he said. “The boogie element…they do it, but sometimes they don’t count bars the same way or something. I mean, they’re really good at it; if you know bands like Can and this sort of thing, they do wonderful music, I think….But when it gets down to getting down, they somehow miss it.”
Although he’s been quite prolific since, his last half-dozen records, released on the German label Rockport, are only spottily available in the English-speaking world. His back catalog’s in sad shape too: In England only a few of his Virgin releases remain in print, along with Sign of the Times, a 1994 best-of collection culled from his years on the label. And in the States, where even the records that made it over the first time around were inexplicably truncated, it’s hard to find anything but his 1990 Peel Sessions and the See for Miles label’s 1995 reissue of Case History.
