Album Review of:
‘PAT FULGONI BLUES EXPERIENCE’
by PAT FULGONU BLUES EXPERIENCE
(Chocolate Fireguard CFA CD009)
Facebook @patfulgonibluesexperience
The Blues walks a long unforgiving road. Sometimes it hops the freight-train, at other times in pays its dues working the chain-gang. It busks on street corners or plays truck-stops on the hard-nose highway between nowhere and noplace, where violence teeters on a knife-edge. Blues was already there at the roots of Jazz as it was there in the explosion of primitive Rock ‘n’ Roll and Heavy Metal. Blues is the skeletal structure beneath all twentieth-century music, etched deep into its DNA. As Pat Fulgoni insists, Blues is at ‘the roots of all popular music.’
A hundred years ago, during 1925, Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter and Henry ‘Blind Lemon’ Jefferson were already recording within a vigorous Blues tradition. A young Robert Johnson was around, but he had yet to make his pact with the Devil at the Crossroads, as Son House would tell the tale. Ma Rainey called the Blues ‘life’s way of talking.’ With its rural Mississippi Delta roots in the African diaspora, the music migrated north looking for work, it got electrified in Chicago, in New York it played the Harlem ‘Apollo’, in Detroit it was smoothed into the ‘Sound Of Young America’.
Fifty years ago – during 1975, Dr Feelgood were issuing Down By The Jetty, Jeff Beck released Blow By Blow, with Foghat, Robin Trower and ZZ Top representing heavy riffs drawing strongly on the rich Blues tradition. Yes, white boys can play the Blues. I could never understand why black American radio stations played Tom Jones’ ‘It’s Not Unusual’ – assuming he was black… then I got suckered… the first time I saw Rag’n’Bone Man performing, and realised he was a big white guy with tatts, not quite what hearing his deep baritone had prepared me for.
And the Blues can be intoxicating. It never went away. It’s not broken. It needs no fixing. Today, there’s Bonnie Raitt, Eric Bibb, Jerron Paxton, Walter Trout, while Joe Bonamassa is ‘Keeping The Blues Alive’ with his slick guitar soloing rooted in British musicians such as Peter Green, Gary Moore, Rory Gallagher and Eric Clapton as well as the American Blues Originators. Whereas, to state a personal preference, I love Blues songstrel Emma Wilson from the NE England who knows her way around the Blues with remarkable assurance. Blame it on the boogie.
So, how did the Blues get to the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield? I remember Dave Jagger playing sighing bottleneck guitar. I recall how poet Steve Sneyd told me of the night Champion Jack Dupree played The Builders Club and pounded the keyboard so hard the piano was never the same again. Pat Fulgoni was there too, by way of his Irish-Italian heritage. ‘I was always listening to guitar-bluesy music at college and stuff like that’ he tells online interviewer Dave Jenkins, ‘so, in a sense, I’m having a midlife crisis, going back to where it all started for me. People like Jimi Hendrix, to be honest – not just as a guitarist, but as a singer. I’ve always loved some of the Blues greats – Muddy Waters, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, I’m a big Stevie Ray Vaughan fan. So it’s just great to have a band that I can perform with… and earn some money from!’
Through the BritPop 1990s Pat fronted ‘completely unmanageable’ Funk-Rock-Psych electronica exponents Kava Kava, ‘at odds with the music industry’ but recording albums for Faust, Delirium, and Pat’s own Chocolate Fireguard label, culminating in Maui (2004, CFGA CD006). They toured extensively from Glastonbury, across Europe to trekking American dates. I saw them playing the 1997 Clarence Park free festival in Wakefield, and was suitably gobsmacked. Seek out their late single ‘Clarity’ (CFADD008) in case you missed it, it’s well worth your while, with Pat growling ‘every time I think you’re done, behind that smile’s a loaded gun.’
He did a couple of guest vocals for electro-dance outfit Camo & Krooked, including sample-strewn ‘Turn Up (The Music)’ (2010, Hospital Records NHS163) – remixed by Pola & Bryson, and although Pat only contributes a repetition of the title phrase, he invests the track with a degree of deep-soul authenticity it would otherwise have lacked. As with the gospel voice on Moby’s ‘Why Does My Heart So Bad?’ There are others. In 2003 he teamed with Zion Train for ‘Do You See Love’ (2003, Silicon Hustler 003VS), then – in 2007, with drum-&-bass practitioner Nu Tone there was ‘Beliefs’ (Hospital Records NHS120). He’s also sung under the guise of Jesus Haystax! ‘Still In Luv With U’ arrived on twelve-inch vinyl as 2002s JH1.‘Vinyl is alive and well in drum-&-bass’ Pat grins, ‘I like vinyl.’
‘Pat’s been around for while’ comments Roar magazine, ‘paying his dues, showing his chops and generally enjoying himself. He did a lot of this further east than his hometown of Huddersfield – and I don’t mean Wakefield, or even Pontefract, I mean eastern Europe. His last album was Live In Prague.’ He does ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ on the live in Prague album, just as he now does it in the studio on his current album, with a line-up of different musicians.
There’s a clip of bearded long-haired Pat Fulgoni performing ‘Drifter’ at the Whitwell Festival of Music during September 2024, with a sharp jazz-funk four-piece group. I remember Jon Lord telling me how the Whitesnake lyric ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been’ was not great poetry, but was great Rock ‘n’ Roll poetry.’ Same with this Fulgoni original song, Blues is about moving, about being rootless, about having no place to call your own. He confesses that he can miss out on his picture-frames, his two computer-games, his trouser-press, his dusty Lego set, because he’s riddled with the wandering-bootheels itch to go. ‘Drifter’ precedes this current line-up, and dates from Pat’s drum-&-bass entanglements with The Vanguard Project Remixes (2022, Fokuz Recordings FOKUZ22192).
Album opener ‘Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven’… but nobody wants to Die, is a slow roller written by Don Nix for Albert King for his 1971 Lovejoy album, recorded with the impeccable Stax label Muscle Shoals studio crew. Pat more or less follows the original arrangement, catching every twisted irony of the lyric, ‘everybody wanna hear the truth, yet everybody wanna tell a lie’; human nature can be contradictory at times. The guitar soloing drips with purity. ‘I wanna hear the truth’ he protests, ‘but still they tell me lies.’ On the strutting Fulgoni original song ‘Keep The Blues Alive’, he’s lost his phone, he lost his legs and almost lost his wife, but when the Blues rains down on him in these times of oscillation, it’s the only thing that speaks to him. Cat-house spatters of piano are layered with veins of dark guitar, and the track works its way in seamlessly among more maturely time-tested songs. He joins the dots.
BB King didn’t write ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, but the Blues-Boy made the yearning twelve-bar his own, with Lucille in attendance melting guitar-tears, buoyed on the subtle use of strings. Radical at the time, but redefining the Blues for the seventies, imitated by everyone from Eric Clapton, up and down. Pat takes it slower, embellished in meandering piano moods, and the thrill is still very much intact. ‘I always hear influences ranging from Thelonious Monk to Debussy in his playing’ say Pat about Sam Bolt, ‘he’s got a real, real nice touch.’
‘Lady Day And John Coltrane’ is a song from Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 Pieces Of A Man album, the one that also includes ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. The song tributes Billie Holiday and the guy who recorded ‘A Love Supreme’, as U2 would in ‘Angel Of Harlem’ – ‘Lady Day got diamond eyes, she sees the truth behind the lies’ while ‘we got John Coltrane and a love supreme,’ both establishing the continuity across decades. Fulgoni performs it live with considerable stage presence in the hazy sunshine of the 2023 Chapel Allerton Festival in Leeds.
Blues Blast magazine praises ‘Bleeding Heart’, as ‘stripped-back with Pat wailing the blues over just piano and harp, and – placed at the halfway point in the album, makes a good interlude between the full band performances.’ A midpoint tempo-change accelerates the sparse production. Then there’s a heavy interpretation of ‘Midnight Train’ with sampled steam-train sounds, a song written by Jon Tiven and Roger Reale as lead single for Buddy Guy’s 1998 album Heavy Love. There’s a hard guitar solo that strips like acid, then ‘hear the drummer get wicked’ yells Pat as Zebedee Sylvester grabs a brief solo. In the Blues mythology, the lonesome railroad ‘Freight Train Blues’ has been a metaphor for freedom all the way from Woody Guthrie’s hobo migrants, to Johnny Cash incarcerated in Folsom prison but tormented by the sound of ‘that train a-rollin’ beyond the walls of his cell.
And there’s a funky treatment of T-Bone Walker’s 1968 ‘Confusion Blues’ from his BluesWay label Stormy Monday Blues album. Written by Grover McDaniel, Pat Fulgoni takes its verses between sharp blades of guitar. Some lazy reviewers have likened his vocal power to Paul Rodgers. But no, when Pat Fulgoni sings the Blues, he ain’t nothin’ but his own sweet self.
A group composition closer, the 8:14-minute ‘Stickin’ The Knife In Blues’ is another sinuous crawl that hates the way this whole world moves, a measured soulful howl of protest that can see where this thing is going, sprinkled with piano, infiltrated by studio engineer Alex Eden’s eerie harmonica, with putdown comments sneaked in between the lines, and guitarwork that speaks, continuing the dialogue with its own articulacy. Again, there’s continuity. Pat works with LOVEMUSIC: HATERACISM, and with other street-level social issues. Yet this might have been an album-track by the Animals. Or a Yardbirds B-side. It might have been dirty low-down Doors track. Yet as it kicks out at TVs grinning faces, it was just as true then as it is now in 2025.
‘In my Blues set at the moment’ he explains, ‘I’m covering greats like Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy… it is what it is, y’know, I’m hoping I’m turning more people onto the Blues.’ The Leeds Roar fanzine welcomes the album’s release with ‘the band often ventures way out from twelve-bar into soulful and psychedelic territory. It’s a seriously satisfying listen.’
The Blues walks a long unforgiving road. From the Mississippi Delta all the way to… Huddersfield. But there ain’t no Blues like a Pat Fulgoni Blues.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
‘PAT FULGONI BLUES EXPERIENCE’
(2024, Chocolate Fireguard CFA CD009) 47-minutes playing time
1. ‘Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven’ (3:40)
- ‘Drifter’ (5:30)
- ‘Keep The Blues Alive’ (6:13)
- ‘Midnight Train’ (4:53)
- ‘Bleeding Heart’ (3:02)
- ‘Lady Day And John Coltrane’ (4:51)
- ‘Confusion Blues’ (4:40)
- ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ (5:13)
- ‘Stickin’ The Knife In Blues’ (8:14)
Pat Fulgoni: vocals
Jacob Beckwith: guitar
Sam Bolt: keyboards
Rory Wells: bass
Zebedee Sylvester: drums
‘DARK SIDE OF THE BLUES: LIVE IN PRAGUE’
(2000, Faust Records FR 07-2331)
1. ‘Help Me’ (Sonny Boy Williamson II) 3:33
2. ‘Hard Times’ (Ray Charles) 5:21
- ‘Who Is He And What Is He To You?’ (Bill Withers) 6:49
- ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ (Rick Darnell & Roy Hawkins) 5:10
- ‘Think Twice Before You Go’ (John Lee Hooker) 2:48
- ‘Texas Flood’ (Steve R Vaughan) 4:07
- ‘Rock Me Baby’ (McKinley ‘Muddy Waters’ Morganfield) 4:37
- ‘How Many More Times’ (Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones) 9:32
- ‘Still In Love With You’ (Phil Lynott) 4:16
- ‘Crossroads’ (Robert Johnson) 3:40