JOHN DU CANN – ‘The Many Sides Of 1967 – 1980’ (Angel Air)
To mis-quote Shakespeare, ‘I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.’ ‘The Many Sides Of 1967 – 1980’ is a sixteen-track anthology spanning thirteen exciting years of John Du Cann’s life, the songs on which being selected by the guitarist/vocalist himself shortly before he sadly passed away in September 2011. Of course, you couldn’t possibly hope to capture the genius of John Du Cann in seventy-one minutes, but ‘The Many Sides Of….’ is about as close as you can get, and is a fitting tribute to the man and his music.
The album is a wide-ranging platform and starts with the psychedelic hippy-shtick of The Attack, moves through the progressive rock of Andromeda at the end of the Sixties to the unique groove of Atomic Rooster; after they spilt there was Bullet, who then had to change their name to Hard Stuff (although Du Cann himself had wanted to rename the band Bulletproof as a sideswipe at the Americans who had forced the change of name; ‘Bulletproof’ became the name of Hard Stuff’s first album), some solo material at the end of the Seventies and finally the reformation of Atomic Rooster in 1980.
With almost all the material on offer being written by Du Cann himself you soon come to realise that as a writer and performer he was a master of the zeitgeist. Each song is a perfect encapsulation of the era in which it was recorded. Even later in the album, ‘She’s My Woman’ from 1977 is more stripped down and could easily appeal to a punk audience; 1979’s ‘Don’t Be A Dummy’ – taken up for a TV advert – is tinged with a healthy splash of American new wave, and the reformed Atomic Rooster offerings – ‘Don’t Lose Your Mind’ and ‘They Took Control Of You’ – could easily have been a great NWOBHM single.
John Du Cann – 1945 – 2011: a sad loss whose brilliance will live on through his music for pretty much all time.
© John Tucker January 2012