Legends. Callum Easter is a cockroach, existing in the dark crevasse between Marc Bolan’s ass cheeks. On one cheek is tattooed the words ‘New Orleans’ and on the other, ‘Castle Morton’. Scotland is not America, no matter what a Glasgow taxi driver tells you. But there is a rocknroll ley line, a seam, that connects Sneaky Pete’s to CBGBs, the Barrowland Ballroom to Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, and Mr Easter is doomed to ride that line, hell for leather, endlessly, bringing the coals and taking them back, red hot to the mother country of rhythm, blues, bass and beats, with the ghost of Alex Harvey whooping him on.
Taught the basics of stride piano and attitude by frat boy Dick Dion at a college in South Carolina when he was a teenager on a sporting scholarship, Easter took this essential knowledge and has drip fed it into his work ever since. Applying the principle to accordion, ancient Japanese drum machine, utterly basic drums and, latterly using it to help produce a guitar sound somewhere between Dave Davies’s and Link Ray’s experiments with speaker cone scarification. Sitting his extraordinary voice on top, flitting from extreme vibrato to early-morning baritone and singing songs about… the words don’t matter it’s the way they’re sung, but if you must know, they take the fastest route, no frills, from the heart to the ears, even when they ‘get political’. System, the latest single, could be a manifesto taken from the pages of Oz and approved by the latest batshit Mancunian baggy merchant except they actually make a kind of sense: f*ck the system and the way it divides and exploits us, not because you have to wear a mask, ya fanny.
Following on from the first track from the album ‘What You Think’ (check that here), the title track from the album ‘System’. Callum pulls apart the video below, blasting politicians and the system at large:
In which genial Scottish father of two Callum Easter is taken from his car by immigration officials after overstaying his visa on a visit to his gran in Hastings, England.
It’s easy to ignore the system until you become one of its victims. System? Which system? The sh*tstem (thank you Peter Tosh), AKA organised bullying and oppression by those with power. Everyone passes it down the line, from royal to MP to rich bastard to not so rich to general to cop to man to woman.
We all know the story, here’s a pop song about it and here’s the singers acting it out right in front of you in 2,073,600 pixels. Bigger than a tweet and you can dance to it. You can’t dance to a tweet. There’s power in a rhythm.
System is the second release for Easter on Moshi Moshi Records after last year’s Green Door Sessions, and debut album Here or Nowhere.