DAMASCENE - Preaching to the Perverted with Paul Hullah, Martin Metcalfe and The Filthy Tongues
DAMASCENE - Preaching to the Perverted with Paul Hullah, Martin Metcalfe and The Filthy Tongues
It’s been ten years since I first saw Paul Hullah and Martin Metcalfe share a stage together. It was my birthday, and the artists formerly known as Teenage Dog Orgy were launching their book, and accompanying 10” vinyl, SCENES, at Henry’s Cellar Bar, the now long lost downbeat basement dive that had become an afterhours den for mischief making musicians of all stripes.
SCENES is a collection of what was described on the cover of the book as ‘words & pictures’, and on the record as ‘words pictures music’. Rather than the pictures illustrating the words, Hullah and Metcalfe turned things on their head, with Metcalfe’s paintings published alongside poetic commentaries by Hullah, as with an art book. Hullah and Metcalfe complement each other perfectly, with Metcalfe’s paintings as haunted as Hullah’s words.
SCENES also features a foreword by Metcalfe’s old bandmate, Shirley Manson. Get a copy if you can. I don’t know what’s become of mine, but if I lent it to anyone, I’d very much like it back, please.
It was the fag end of Edinburgh festivals season when SCENES was launched, and my mate Doug had whisked me off to Henry’s as a treat. I knew Paul and Martin’s work separately, and it was a rare chance to see them regroup in such an intimate and all too appropriate environment.
Separately and together, and at various times and places, Martin and Paul have remained the embodiment of Edinburgh’s post punk beat scene. Given their collective baggage, Henry’s was the perfect host for Martin and Paul’s scuzzed-up dispatches from the frontline of the underground.
A decade on, and Paul and Martin are back with DAMASCENE, a CD soundtrack to SCENES, featuring Paul performing ten spoken-word pieces over a fleshed out backing provided by Martin and The Filthy Tongues. This is the band Martin has fronted over five albums across fifteen or so years alongside occasional forays with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, Martin’s other band, who first made major label waves in the 1980s.
This weekend sees Paul make a prodigal’s return to Scotland to team up with Martin and the rest of The Filthy Tongues once more to perform DAMASCENE live. Judging by the album, the three shows they will be playing are likely to sound as urgent as if they’d just got together. The roots of Martin and Paul’s collaboration, however, go back decades.
I only saw Goodbye Mr Mackenzie once first time round, when they played Coasters in Tollcross at some point circa 1986 or thereabouts. Maybe a bit later. A photographer mate blagged us on to the guest list, possibly to do with community newspaper the Tollcross Times, which we both did stuff for. I remember how packed it was, and how big the sound was. If things had worked out how they were supposed to, Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie should have been huge. What happened instead is well documented elsewhere.
I have a vague memory from around the same time, of seeing a line drawing of Martin and another guy on posters around town for gigs in the pub below my old flat on George IV Bridge. I can’t remember what they called themselves, but I think they played covers on a Friday night, but I may be remembering this wrong.
Whatever, it was years until I saw Martin play again with bass player Fin Wilson and drummer Derek Kelly, first as Isa & the Filthy Tongues, with Stacey Chavis on vocals, then after Chavis left, just as The Filthy Tongues. I think the first time I saw them with Martin fronting them was at the Voodoo Rooms, when they played their theme song to Richard Jobson’s film, New Town Killers (2009). They sounded reborn, as they have done ever since.
I first encountered Paul’s name when he was writing for the List magazine and edited TLN (Tennant’s Live News). He turned up at least once, I think, to the old spoken word nights at the Antiquary pub on St Stephen Street in the early 90s. I definitely saw him read a few years later at Moray House Student Union at a benefit show for a punk based theatre show called Two Sevens Clash. Paul shared a bill with a fleetingly reformed Fire Engines, who also played as Dirty Reds, with Tam Dean Burn on lead vocals.
I picked up a couple of Paul’s poetry books along the way, and read his beautiful tribute to our mutual friend, Paul Reekie, I hadn’t known the two Pauls shared a flat for five years. Imagine that. So much poetry. So much decadence.
Later still, another loss of another poet and mutual friend, Roddy Lumsden, saw Paul write another loving tribute. Both articles appeared in The Leither, the best print publication in Scotland, edited by Edinburgh man about town and former Teenage Dog Orgy bass player, Billy Gould.
Paul has also written of his friendship with Martin, which began in the old Green Banana Club at the University of Edinburgh’s Potterow complex, whereupon the pair embarked on an intense and peripatetic quest for enlightenment by way of sex, drugs, rock and roll and poetry. But that’s a tale for Paul and Martin to tell. Both have lived to tell it, and SCENES and DAMASCENE might well be it.
At Henry’s, a black clad Martin played a brooding guitar behind beard and shades, while Paul gripped the microphone, taut and intense in his punky leather jacket as he delivered his bruised litanies. In Glasgow they played with the full Filthy Tongues trio, as well as members of Lola in Slacks. Henry’s was a stripped down show that left them nowhere to hide, with Paul’s words sounding even rawer. As birthday nights out go, it was pretty full on.
A lot has happened in the decade since SCENES was launched. The world may have gone mad several times over, but Paul is still living in Japan, where he is Associate Professor of British Poetry and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. Martin’s musical adventures with The Filthy Tongues and Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie have run on space, and I have seen him rip up stages with both. Martin looks increasingly like some wildest hellfire preacher, with Fin and Derek still riding shotgun, as they have done since Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie days.
Further adventures have seen Martin and the Tongues play with Maria Rud, the Russian artist who creates live paintings, with her form of action art projected live behind musicians assorted multi media happenings and events.
One – Shamanic (2018) - saw Martin play with Kid Congo Powers, Fay Fife and others in the grounds of the University of Edinburgh’s Old Quad. As the band blasted out dark voodoo, Maria’s paint splatters metamorphosed into something spiritual against the full back wall of the building, before Rock Follies actress Rula Lenska somewhat incongruously came on and read Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic epic, The Raven.
Another collaboration saw The Filthy Tongues and Rud on stage with actor Tam Dean Burn in Revelations of Rab McVie (2023), a blistering theatrical evocation of war torn hellscapes.
Which brings us bang up to date with DAMASCENE. Paul is back in the UK to attend an Iris Murdoch conference in his guise as editor of Japanese editions of Murdoch’s poetry and essays. He may not be back again for some time. With this in mind, the Damascene shows with the Filthy Tongues are pretty much compulsory.
Preaching to the converted? Maybe so, but without the zeal of converts, there would be no DAMASCENE, and there would be no SCENES. Paul and Martin are believers. In what, exactly, I’m not sure, but music, poetry and true love will be in there, for sure. All this will be in evidence this weekend. Paul Hullah, Martin Metcalfe and the Filthy Tongues may have already made SCENES, but they are still making a scene.
The Filthy Tongues (almost acoustic set) featuring Paul Hullah - Drygate, Glasgow, Friday September 13th; Behind the Wall, Falkirk, Saturday September 14th; Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, Sunday September 15th.
SCENES and DAMASCENE are available from Blokshok - https://blokshok.bigcartel.com/category/the-filthy-tongues
Read The Leither - https://www.leithermagazine.com/
Images care of Paul Hullah and Martin Metcalfe:
1 - Yaoyao Mu
2 and 9 - SCENES and DAMASCENE
3 - SCENES
4 - The Leither
5 and 6 - Peter Tainsh
7 - DAMASCENE
8 - Pat McGuire
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See you on Sunday!