THE MEL OUTSIDER REFORMATION:
MORE THAN THREE-CHORD WONDERS
All Rock stars are outsiders. It comes with the job description. Moody rebels, surly misfits without a cause. Hey Mel, what are you rebelling against? ‘Whadda you got?’ It’s the Rock star’s role to externalise our inner angst, to embody the alienation that dare not speak its name, to talk through our more irrational impulses. ‘Most of the Rock stars that I’ve encountered are actors’ says Mel Outsider.
The Mel Outsider Reformation is educated Rock that brims with genius, informed with an insider’s knowing. In literary terms it runs from Albert Camus ‘The Outsider’ (1946) through Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’ (1956), but with a killer backbeat, jack-knife rhythms and death-wish guitar riffs that need ratifying by the Geneva Convention. They know all the right poses. They touch the correct reference points, Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, Mink DeVille, Stiff Records, Patti Smith, Graham Parker & the Rumour, Lou Reed. ‘Thanks, lovely compliments,’ he says, ‘nothing was wilfully directed at any musical reference points, but I would certainly be pleased to be categorised alongside such luminaries. Listening to such greats has always been a soundtrack although for most of the last twenty-five years I’ve tried to immerse myself in Soul music, Philly being my go-to preference. I’ve got no idea why I do this actually.’
The reality of it has the familiarity of difference. Shifted sideways. Watch the video for ‘Disley Blonde’ shot in cool monochrome, and it’s all sharp leather and shades, the street-corner hoodlum H-bomb slouch-stances, a feather boa, the hiss of stylus biting vinyl, mainlining on smashed neon tubes. Classic Rock sleazy Blues with fuel-injected licks and a rippling piano interlude. It’s highly likely, but not definitely certain, that Mel did not murder the hitchhiker glimpsed in the rear-view mirror. He’s a reconditioned appliance taking a walk through the danger zone. Cut this band and it bleeds a quickening pulse of electric beats-per-second. It’s everything you most loved about music rammed through the blender’s immaculate fix.
Mel must be very proud of the band’s current ‘Miss Victory V’… it’s a very powerful album. ‘Yes, very proud. It’s most definitely the one album that feels more developed and expansive than the previous ones. The previous band were always too busy on the road for anything to be completely considered, everything was always very rushed which resulted in a ‘that’s okay, it will have to do’ attitude. Surviving a year on the road with my old group was Rock ‘n’ Roll bootcamp, it was killing me slowly. With the new set up, everything seems to have calmed down a little. I’m pleased about that. I’m pleased that people are finding interest in the new group and engaging with the lyrics. I’ve got a great squad. I can name a team for the gigs a bit like Brian Clough might have done.’
Isn’t that the very best reason to create… guided by that inner impulse? the intuitive? ‘Yes, I guess so, and the instinct that I could do much better than I had done previously. A toned down more melodic sound with the female vocals and the brass arrangements really kept me interested and that’s something that will continue. We are recording new material at the moment.’
The thirteen generous tracks on the ‘Miss Victory V’ (Planet Records PLANCD41) album – ‘a classy Rock set by a long-standing band with a shifting line-up but a resilient core membership’ according to critic Norman Darwen (in ‘RnR’ magazine), it snatches dashboard confessionals in observational snapshots. ‘Remember where you came from,’ he self-cautions as his trip starts outside a hair salon in Disley, south Manchester, narrating a journey of regret and futile pleasure seeking. ‘Misty Colour Hotel’ is located midway between ‘Heartbreak’ and ‘California’, ‘empty streets, empty city’, desolation angels that conjure the crummy low budget hotel lobbies he’s had the displeasure to frequent as the Rock star he never was. A distant sax wails mournful bebop phrases in nifty moves. It’s here that Mel professes to remake and remodel his band. ‘Remake Remodel’ was once the title of a Bryan Ferry song on the first Roxy Music album. Now it’s a track where bass strings resonate, and horns honk around jousting guitars. It’s a story in which Mel admits to throwing her painting from the window of the College Art Block, as a soulful girl-voice breaks in, and ‘when a band is cracking up, you just gotta start at the bottom.’
They take songs from the Rock ‘n’ Roll wide-screen mythology, but place it in a very northern English setting, Blackpool and Lancashire factory girls. ‘That’s how we live, so it’s staying true to the cause, if I hear any Americanism drifting into the vocal accent I ask them to stop doing that please. Lancashire and the North is huge and a very varied palette from which to apply the textures.’ Yes, Manchester has a massive music history, from the Hollies and Freddie & The Dreamers through to New Order and Oasis. ‘That’s very true – but we live in Colne near Burnley, so we are just slightly removed from the tall buildings and trendy northern quarter area.’
But he’s a character who can’t let go of the luring Rock ‘n’ Roll dream, who refuses to go straight with a comfy suburban life, so ploughs ahead pouring out his heart to his soulmate in ‘Queen Of The City’, talk-singing to some kind of Audrey Hepburn Holly Golightly, falling away to just a drum-click behind his pleading vocal. Powerhouse vocalist Hayley Gaftarnick and the sublime Ellie Coast (both from Leeds) share accompanying vocals. The Lancashire factory girls of yesteryear remind him of a lost weekend in Blackpool with a crowned beauty pageant winner on the lozenge-shaped ‘Miss Victory V’, ‘in the chill of the winter by the factory wall, there’s a figure walking shadow by the side of the road.’ A manic Hammond organ dances as the back-up girls chant ‘I’m no judge but it’s plain to see, just exactly why they call you Miss Victory V.’
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If the Adverts were the ‘One Chord Wonders’, and Status Quo were ‘In Search Of The Fourth Chord’ according to the title of their 2007 album, Mel plays therapist to the underdogs, wastrels and ne’er-do-wells through the saga ‘More Than A Three Chord Wonder’. It’s a wearily testifying soul ache with chiming Stax guitar in which he’s ‘like a Boxer that just won’t quit, I’m still searching for one last hit.’ Until ‘Education’ is an epic track that opens with martial drums, to move into the dense crashing jazz-literate instrumentation and hurdy-gurdy organ of a kind once flaunted by the Blockheads, as covert operation guitars skydive all the way. With lyrics that Ian Dury might have penned about a girl at the bar who wants to go to Paris to see the Colosseum, and a guy at the bus-stop who asks ‘wasn’t Julius Caesar the cat who designed the leaning tower of Pisa?’ ‘It’s just a bit of fun wordplay really’ he says dismissively. ‘I do hear young people coming out with all sorts of rubbish when I’m in the pub, I get most song ideas when I’ve had a couple and awkwardly when I’m driving just before a full moon. Have you ever tried jotting ideas down on the steering wheel? It’s not easy on the M6.’ Jack Kerouac used to be great writing about life ‘On The Road’… but that was before Rock ‘n’ Roll came along!
‘Yes, it’s all part true part observational.’ It’s like he’s reading his own back pages, ‘I have a story, a story to tell,’ about how – finding life too slow and dreary, fifteen-year-old Adrian Melling aka ‘Mel Outsider’ started out as the East Lancashire runaway who cut school to spin the Waltzer cars amid flashing fairground lights, loud music, popcorn and girls, and walk the ponies for the travelling circus. ‘Yes, myself and a pal called Colin Hutchinson ran away with a small town circus, it wasn’t very glamorous sweeping up the sawdust and dealing with the ponies but we could have a good drink in our knackered caravan which became home for a short while. Colin never came home, and we were recently reunited in Morecambe of all places. I hadn’t seen him since 1976!’
Hit by the itch to move by the luring thunder of a distant freight train, he was soon ‘running round town like a Rock ‘n’ Roll fool.’ Until, for over five decades, Mel has been a mainstay of the local music scene. If there’s a music industry job he ain’t done, I’ve yet to hear of it. He’s been label boss, record shop proprietor, promoter, tour manager, producer, mover, shaker and Rock ’n’ Roll groover, Rock ‘n’ Roll he gave you the best years of his life. As songwriter lyricist and main character he was flamboyant frontman of Brit Rockers the Outsiders, who recorded two albums, ‘Skin’ (1990) and ‘Ripped Shirt’ (1993). Trouble is, there’d been a 1960s Cleveland band called the Outsiders whose cult garage-acid single ‘Time Won’t Let Me’ was collected onto Lenny Kaye’s ‘Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968’. Then there was a Wimbledon Punk band also called the Outsiders who recorded for Raw Edge Records around 1977.
‘Yes, there were various other groups called The Outsiders. Around 1990 whilst on tour in Holland we discovered that the third most famous group in Holland were also called the Outsiders. It’s not a very imaginative name. But it was pre-internet when we started, and by then we were too far down the line to our detriment, so we simply re-branded as the Outsiders UK.’ So Mel’s band became Outsiders UK to complete a staggering 286 live gigs in 365 days to promote LP ‘Black Shoes And Travelling TV’ (1998). Outsiders UK became popular across the European circuit, releasing final critically acclaimed album ‘Everything’s Gone Vintage’ (2016).
‘That’s why I switched to the more unique name, in order to step in line with the search engines!’ So now they’re back in the new guise of The Mel Outsider Reformation. And each track on ‘Miss Victory V’ is killer, from the slapping backbeat and thick dirty smears of searing sax on ‘Iron Age’ confiding ‘secrets never to be told’, the muted meditation on heritage that is ‘Bikini Diet Plan’, ‘S-Bend Phantom’ which is more z-bend Dead Man’s Curve than it is a plumbing convenience, on which Mel’s voice sneers and insinuates around stratospheric guitar. ‘Real Go-Getter’ is a mean motor-scooter where ‘I gotta pay the rent, but my money’s all been spent.’ And there’s a ‘Bad Boogaloo’ that’s swamp-thick, wearing its wink-hat, running on fumes, and namechecking The Killer and Ramsey Lewis en route.
The album’s standout track, ‘Knock ‘Em Up Jack’ is key, a Rock ‘n’ Roll odyssey that takes in empty rooms and one-night stands until it’s too late to stop – ‘why don’t you give these guys a break? they’ve been playing too long,’ and Velvet Underground’s ‘Sweet Jane’ in the everyday story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll music band. ‘Yes, ‘Sweet Jane’ was a record that a Dutch venue owner would always seem to play while we were waiting to hit the stage at his venue’ Mel explains. ‘It was called ‘Cafe de Klomp’ in a town called Etten-Leur. His name was Jac van Donggen and that’s why the track is called ‘Knock ‘Em Up Jack’. We used to stay upstairs in his flat.’ The reference to ‘Sweet Jane’ I can understand, but why does Mel also name-check jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis…? ‘Ramsey Lewis is another neglected name and his record ‘Wade In The Water’ started my love of soul and jazz.’ But there are other inputs. ‘I can also hear the beauty in those wonderful seventies recordings by Colin Blunstone.’
This time around the band retains the services of musical director and bassist Matt Pawson and guitarist Liam McCartan. Dan Arnold joins on guitar alongside Karl Francis on drums. Barney ‘Boogie’ Williams from The Milltown Brothers & The Animals takes organ, piano & keyboard duties. Andy Morell plays sax and leads The Pocket Central Horns. The ‘Miss Victory V’ project was produced in Accrington by Mark Jones of Real World Studios, who describes the album as ‘the Rock ‘n’ Roll ‘Dante’s Inferno’ for the Twenty-First century.’ Mark has previously produced, engineered and worked with such luminaries as Peter Gabriel, Cat Stevens, Patti Smith, The Blue Nile, Wishbone Ash, The Ting Tings, Black Grape and Goldfrapp to name but several. Grammy winner Mark Phythian was on hand to aid and master, as he had done for Coldplay.
But Mel’s also a musical all-rounder. He’s rubbed stylish shoulders with famous and infamous Rockers, Blues performers and singer-songwriters. No mean producer in his own right, he’s produced twenty-eight albums for artists including Heads Hands And Feet (with Albert Lee and Chas Hodges), New York songwriter/ poet Angela Costa (winner of the Allen Ginsberg prize) along with Michael Chapman.
Just going off at a tangent here… many years back this writer used to see Mick Ronson when he played with Michael Chapman. I always held Michael Chapman in high regard as a writer and a performer. What kind of an experience was it to work with him? ‘Michael was a fun guy to be around, he really knew the road and his ‘Fully Qualified Survivor’ (1970) record for EMI was introduced into my young life by my elder brother Keith. I played it non-stop. I met Michael in 1994 and asked him to make a new studio album for my label Planet Records (another unimaginative name, sorry). We put his twenty-first album ‘Navigation’ out in 1995 and had top Folk album of the year for this one, it’s a cracker and was a return to form for him as he had been in the musical wilderness for a while. I found Michael to be great company and also very supportive to other young writers that we worked with in these days.’ Mel also travelled and worked with Delta blues legend David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards – who once recorded in Chicago with Peter Green’s original Fleetwood Mac and was the last surviving musical link to Robert Johnson. Mel promises to release an album of unheard ‘Honeyboy’ recordings.
As with Ian Hunter, it’s a mighty long way down the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dream but the road goes on forever. ‘Yes, I love Mott The Hoople too. I approached Verden Allen from Mott The Hoople with the offer of joining on key’s, he was interested but turned me down on account that we had two guitars, he said that he would play with one guitar but couldn’t face two.’ But once you’ve played with Mick Ronson, I guess he has high standards. ‘None better than Mick Ronson, Jeff Beck, Zal Cleminson (of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band) best three guitarists in the world, Oh and Paul Kossoff. Much better than that awful Jimi Hendrix racket.’
Don’t stop bopping. All Rock stars are outsiders.
INSIDERS/ OUTSIDERS
1988 – ‘Grit In The Oyster’ compilation (Pendle Hawk Records, Pen001), includes Outsiders ‘People Stop’
April 1990 – ‘Skin’ ten-track LP (Planet Records, Plan002), the Outsiders on ‘Skin’ were Colne East Lancs based with three ex-members of Manchester New Wave Of Heavy Metal band Touched (Ebony label) and Aragorn (Neat records), it also included members from Dragster and SFW. Side one: (1) ‘Bastard Blues On A Kamikaze Highway, (2) ‘Misinformation’, (3) ‘Plough Boy’, (4) ‘No Good’, (5) ‘Skin’. Side two: (1) ‘Tuff’, (2) ‘James Brown Blues’, (3) ‘Hate To See My Baby Growing Up This Way’, (4) ‘Genie Genie’, (5) ‘Only Flame In This Town’.
1993 – ‘Ripped Shirt’, the Outsiders, thirteen-track CD (Planet Records, Plan004) Mel Outsider (vocals, guitar, harmonica), Liam McCartan (bass, vocals), Paul Edmondson (drums), Peter Rowlands (guitar, voice). (1) ‘Bastard Blues On A Kamikaze Highway’, (2) ‘Get It’, (3) ‘Ripped Shirt’, (4) ‘What If I Don’t Know Your Mind’, (5) ‘Headline Blues’, (6) ‘Dirty Side Of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, (7) ‘Leave The Past Behind’, (8) ‘I Want You’, (9) ‘We’ll Be Drinkin’’, (10) ‘Down (Like An Apple)’, (11) ‘Poor Cow’, (12) ‘Still Life’, (13) ‘Tell Mam’, (14) ‘Nothin’’.
1997 – ‘What’s In The Pub 96’ eighteen-track compilation (Dutch release, Pub001)
1998 – ‘Black Shoes And Travelling TV’ by Outsiders UK, ten-track CD (Planet Plan16) with (1) ‘These Days’ 4:41, (2) ‘Bring Em All In’ 4:00, (3) ‘Through The Gardens That We Know So Well’ 6:52, (4) ‘Black Shoes And Travelling TV’ 5:39, (5) ‘Licky Pup’ 5:31, (6) ‘The Proud Ones’ 4:15, (7) ‘Hate To See My Baby Growing Up That Way (Version Two)’ 3:57, (8) ‘Stuck In Old Diane With You’ 3:35, (9) ‘No Good’ 2:37, (10) ‘Some Kinda Law’ 3:35.
1999 – ‘What’s In The Pub 99’ twenty-track compilation (Dutch release, Pub002)
2016 – ‘Mersey Girls’ seven-inch single (Plan38)
2018 – ‘Everything’s Gone Vintage’ by The Outsiders UK (June 2018, Planet Records PLANCD39)
(1) ‘Memory Lane’ 4:28, (2) ‘Millstones And The Wheels Of Steel’ 4:03, (3) ‘Mersey Girls’ 3:27, (4) ‘River Blindness’ 5:59, (5) ‘Hurricane Sister’ 6:04, (6) ‘Loose Connections’ 5:44, (7) ‘Confidence Tricksters’ 5:04, (8) ‘Chain Lightning’ 3:43, (9) ‘Panza People’ 8:17, (10) ‘Death Rides A Pale Horse’ 5:13
2022 – ‘Miss Victory V’ (2022, Planet Records PLANCD41) as The Mel Outsider Reformation, (1) ‘Disley Blonde’ 3:57, (2) ‘Misty Colour Hotel’ 4:43, (3) ‘Queen Of The City’ 3:58, (4) ‘Miss Victory V’ 4:17, (5) ‘Remake Remodel’ 5:05, (6) ‘More Than A Three-Chord Wonder’ 5:37, (7) ‘Iron Age’ 4:53, (8) ‘Bikini Diet Plan’ 3:25, (9) ‘Education’ 6:33, (10) ‘S-Bend Phantom’ 4:54, (11) ‘Real Go-Getter’ 4:43, (12) ‘Knock ‘Em Up Jack’ 5:03, (13) ‘Bad Boogaloo’ 2:55
VIDEOS:
https://www.youtube.com/@planetrecords1478
The Mel Outsider Reformation, ‘Disley Blonde’ official music video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaRonIHTM9s
The Mel Outsider Reformation (featuring Ellie Coast ) ‘Queen Of The City’, official Video
www.meloutsider.co.uk
Electronic Press Kit https://bit.ly/MelOutsiderRPK
For further details, interviews with Adrian or high res jpgs, contact Sean McGhee/Reel Press
Tel: 01946812496 Email: [email protected]
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON