No decent music ever emanated from my footy club. It was long Saturday nights spent drunkenly slurring the chorus to Khe Sanh, punctuated with soulful interludes droning on about some hotel in California littered with of two-bit hookers and mountains of cocaine
No decent music ever emanated from my footy club. It was long Saturday nights spent drunkenly slurring the chorus to Khe Sanh, punctuated with soulful interludes droning on about some hotel in California littered with of two-bit hookers and mountains of cocaine. It was male bonding, verging on homo-eroticism. If Freud had been present, he’d have downed a couple of Sub Zeros and run screaming from the premises.
So it’s with some surprise that President Roots have managed to lay down a slab of quality roots’n’blues’n’good-shit after spending a week-long session at the Sorrento Football Club. Five tracks from the session have made their way onto the Shark Den Blues album, each song as pleasing as a perfectly weighted drop punt delivered onto a leading full-forward’s advancing chest.
Gods Weighting Room (sic) has the opiate-rich laconic elegance of Keef and Mick shooting the shit on a lazy Sunday afternoon; The Other Side is down and dirty, all classy sleaze and quality thrust, just like the blues was before the white boy music industry drowned it in AM radio bleach. Glad Eye sticks its riff down your throat like a porno star on the casting couch, All I Wanna Do Is Drink is another contribution to the time-honoured canon of alcoholic protestations, while the golden country That Lucky Old Sun is wistful and whimsical as The Band playing the beer garden of the Sorrento Hotel.
Back in the day, roots music at the footy club meant heading down to the local meat market, downing a quintet of Sambucas and slurring offensive come-ons to any woman on the dance floor who could bare the sight of the Neanderthal dweeb. If only we’d had President Roots to change the record.
