I Want My Crown

KEVIN COYNE

I Want My Crown

EMI 4-CD box set

With ‘I Want My Crown’ much missed maverick Blues wailer Kevin Coyne finally gets a retrospective that does him proud. Concentrating on the years he spent on Virgin 1973-1980, the set offers up choice album cuts, rarities and a full CD of Coyne live.

Championed by John Peel and John Lydon, Coyne was always the outsider in the world of the seventies singer songwriters. His music was abrasive, uneasy and often comic. Occasionally, as on ‘Mona Where’s Your Trousers?’ or ‘Fat Girl’, all at the same time. He also wasn’t afraid to rock out. Tracks like the angry ‘Turpentine’ or the defiant ‘Dynamite Daze’ and especially ‘Eastbourne Ladies’as white hot and thrilling as offered up by the punks a few years later.

Coyne was deeply affected by his work as a psychiatric nurse, and many of the songs are influenced by the people and the institutions he worked with and for. ‘House on the Hill’ is a moving and beautiful song about mental illness, free from any of prurient gawping and romanticism. It’s fragility emphasised by the minimal arrangement.

It was probably the stripped down, honesty and power of Coyne’s work that lead him surviving punk intact, (four tracks from his final Virgin album see him being backed by the Ruts). A lot of his later work seems to prefigure some of the soundscapes which PIL would later explore. The ‘Burning Head Suite’ recorded live in 1979 using just a drum machine, and a radio and accompanied by a spectral Zoot Money is just as spacious and haunting as anything on Metal Box.

He was unflinching and confrontational, the opening track ‘Marjory Razorblade’ has him singing what could have been a musichall pastiche as if it was primal scream therapy.  ‘Learn to Swim, Learn to Drown’ sees him howling in lonely avant-blues dungeon.

But don’t think it’s all darkness and lunacy, there are also great swathes of romanticism as well. Coyne’s love songs are refreshingly free of any of the sappy airy-fairiness or bare-chested machismo that passed for most romantic songs of the era. ‘Sunday Morning Sunrise’ might have almost been a conventional love song if its lyric wasn’t so honest. Similarly ‘I’m Just a Man’ which is almost conversational in its tone, gets down to the truth about love. All without any ohh baby babies as well!

However, he never forgot that music wasn’t just poetry, and there are enough tunes that make you want to dance, from the twisted Glam stomp of ‘Lorna’ and ‘Brothers of Mine’ to the old style boogie of ‘Lonely Lovers’ there is plenty to keep your feet tapping.

Kevin Coyne never made it as huge star. In the end he was probably too singular and too British. But then what do you expect from the man who down Jim Morrison’s role in The Doors because he ‘didn’t fancy the leather trousers’?