Alabama 3 - Hits And Exit Wounds - Out Now

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In celebration of a long, esteemed and wholly unique career that has seen The Guardian dub them “the best live band in Britain” Alabama 3 have released a definitive retrospective album.

Following recent performances at fundraisers and in Brixton Prison the band will head out on a full UK tour in April (full dates click here). Featuring material from throughout their years together, these shows will culminate in Rock Against Racism’s Hope Not Hate concert at the Carling Academy again in Brixton, the band’s spiritual home.

 

 

Alabama 3 - Tour Dates

20.04.08 - Shrewsbury Buttermarket
21.04.08 - Preston 53 Degrees
22.04.08 – Glasgow ABC
23.04.08 – Dundee Fat Sam’s
24.04.08 – Newcastle Academy
25.04.08 – Sheffield The Plug
26.04.08 – Manchester Academy
27.04.08 – Bristol Academy
28.04.08 – Aylesbury Civic
29.04.08 – Wolverhampton Wolfrun Hall
30.04.08 - London Brixton Academy (Hope Not Hate)

Alabama 3 is proud to announce that they are to headline the Hope Not Hate gig in 2008 marking the 30th anniversary of the Rock Against Racism carnival. The event will feature the Alabama 3 plus Misty in Roots, veteran orator Tony Benn and some very special guests on Wednesday 30th April 2008 at the Carling Academy Brixton. All proceeds from the gig will go to a legacy project taking the modern history of Rock Against Racism into schools and colleges.

From Jesse James to Bonnie & Clyde, Billy the Kid to Butch Cassidy, the world of the outlaw has been endlessly eulogised in song, play and film while the outlaw’s tales have become sewn into the very fabric of Western culture. Indeed the outlaw ethos lies at the heart of everything from the gang aesthetic to the bling bling ideology of contemporary urban culture. It’s all about being the outsider - living through an alternative code. Alabama 3 know all about being outsiders. They’ve taken an outlaw approach since the day they first emerged from the free party scene to combine acid house with country and western. Across four deeply infectious, darkly humoured, lysergically charged albums they’ve made impossible musical collision sound as natural as the swamp, They’ve cheated death on the road to bring one of the most exhilarating live shows ever to have emerged from rehab. They’ve dropped subversive politics into sweet country verses and delivered sermons of love to the Godless masses. They’ve enriched and inspired the chemically charged underground through their counter-cultural, proto-situationist pursuits and, despite of, or perhaps because of all this, they’ve even provided the theme to the profoundly paranoiac Mafia (outlaw) series “Sopranos”. Oh yes, Alabama 3 may come on like Irvine Welsh’s house band stalking the gutters of ghetto culture, but they infiltrate the corridors of the mainstream just as easily. Like any good counter-cultural, proto-situationist country and western techno outlaw band from Brixton in fact. The Alabama 3 script(ure) was conceived by Larry Love (Rob Spragg) and The Very Reverend Dr. D. Wayne Love (Jake Black) in the sweat soaked hedonism of the free party experience of 1988, blueprinted over two twelves for Nottingham’s DIY imprint and finally delivered as a fully fledged sermon by the mid-90’s in the shape of The First Presleyterian Church Of Elvis The Divine (UK) with its band of misfit disciples ­ The Mountain of Love (Piers Marsh), Sir Real Congaman Love (Simon Edwards), The Spirit (Orlando Harrison), Rock Freebass (Mark Sams) and L.B. Dope (Jonny Delafons). The first book of gospels made its long playing debut in 1997 with “Exile On Coldharbour Lane”, a twelve song strong album of wayward country and western, blues and bluegrass poisoned by the narcotic thrust of contemporary clubland, dancing to the obtuse beats of a very different drum. With tongues sharpened to needlepoint precision, Larry and D. Wayne delivered lyrics that cut to the heart of the culture’s underbelly with wry humour and rapier wit. With “La Peste” (2000) Alabama 3 took their country and blues obsessions into ever-darker territory offering along the way the only version of The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ to actually sound as cocaine addled as the song’s subject matter. “Power In the Blood” (2002) found the band going deeply introspective. Their once humorous observations now peppered with disillusionment and anger, their once bittersweet Americana samplefests overridden by swathes of techno. In 2003 Alabama 3 took the unusual step of delivering a versions album. “Last Train to Mashville Vol. 2” presented the band’s greatest moments in stripped down acoustic form, thus bringing their country blues heartbeat to the fore courtesy of guest appearances from the offshoot Alabama extravaganza, The Larry Love Showband. The latest offering is simply called “Outlaw”. Once again it features wit as sharp as a needle. Once again it’s built around a melange of country, bluegrass, the blues and home-grown techno. However, where previous outings occasionally found the disparate elements engaged in a stylistic tug of war, this set sounds completely natural. No longer a case of welding together opposites in a perverse game of Push The Parameters, but simply an exercise in common ground. These are sounds that emerged from the (under)ground up. Decades apart perhaps, but from the same unifying tortured soul. The songs of life’s outsiders. The sounds of history’s outlaws. And it’s a great record. Far more extravert than either “La Peste” and “Power in the Blood”, more pure than “Exile on Coldharbour Lane”, “Outlaw” finds the band jumping the trains of sepia tinted American mythology and drawing a direct line to the all too often unsung outlaws of British history. “For me the heart of this record came from a conversation I had with Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds at a literary festival in Clerkenwell.” Explains Rob “It occurred to me that the US has a tradition of outlaw records but in England we’ve got nothing apart from ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen’.” True England has been reticent to mytholagise her outlaws. Not since the days of the 17th Century highwaymen when poets waxed lyrical about these darkly heroic figures. Or the same era when all outlaws to be hung in Tyburn, London would have their own specially written ballad to accompany the sound of the rope stretching. Penning eulogies to highwaymen, vagabonds, urchins and rogues was a big business ­ back then. Since the Tyburn Ballads there hasn’t been much though. Save a song by Fairport Convention, a tasteless Ronnie Biggs vocalised post-Lydon Sex Pistols song and a dreadful Phil Collins movie, the Great Train Robbers have rarely been subject to mythologizing. So Rob and his Alabama brothers set about putting that right. Using the initial building block of beats inspired by old Johnny Cash records he laid down the bare bones of “Outlaw” and then let it grow organically. Calling in choice performances from a few friends along the way. These included BJ Cole, MC Tunes, Gary Lucas from the Magic Band and the initial inspiration for the album Bruce Richard Reynolds. Just as that meeting with Reynolds inspired the album’s central, so the musical focal point is the swamp blues classic ‘Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds’ in which D.Wayne Love can be heard extolling the romanticised virtues of the mastermind behind the Great Train robbery and locating the Glasgow to Euston train deep in the heart of the Nashville. “Outlaw” is crammed with train metaphors. ‘Track 10’ finds a teenage runaway jumping boxcars to the hook from Aslan’s ‘Crazy World’. ‘The opening track, a techno blues invitation to ride the ‘Last Train to Mashville’. An album that draws on the unifying experience of the outsider fuses cultures and revels in the resulting confusion. It’s an album about survival in a crazy world, a record that is rich in its own humanity (like all great story tellers Rob brings to life the real emotions at the core of the moody, dangerous ghetto - a fact that goes way beyond bling bling culture). Above all however “Outlaw” is the album that Alabama 3 have threatened to make since day one. Welcome to the new era of the Tyburn Ballad, with Alabama 3 the new balladeers reappraising British outlaw culture and relocating it alongside the Hole in the Wall Gang, The James Gang and every great gang to have ever ridden rough shod through American mythology.

MARTIN JAMES