Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
Come On Over Baby, We've Got Chicken In The Barn
Dec 17, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Going Up The Country
original version appears on Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
"This track was sung to us before we heard the record by 'Canned Heat'. The track was written by a woman called 'Beverly White' and it was from this record of the 1920's that the lyrics were taken from. The tune was derived from a song called 'Bulldoze Blues' written by Henry Thomas in about 1929.
We had tried all day to record it and then gave up and all went for a drink in the local pub. When we got home we were fired up and decided to give it another go so we fired the gear up and half drunken rocked the song onto tape. We did one take and then chose that as our single. If you listen closely you can hear the B string on the piano snapping." - Lewis Durham
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Buggin' Blues
original version appears on Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
Written by Lewis and is the second track on the album and double A-side to single (Baby) Hold Me Tight. One of the inspirations for Lewis on this song was the great Otis Spann, one of the house piano players at Chess Records in Chicago, Illinois. He had a certain style which was simple at most times but very powerful. He only released one single under his own name in the 1950's which was called 'It Must Have Been The Devil', recorded at Universal Studios (nothing to do with Universal Records) and released on Checker (a Chess subsidiary).
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The Ska Song
unreleased
Somewhat of an illusive number in the Kitty, Daisy & Lewis repertoire, Ska Song is yet to exist on record having not featured on the album or singles. Featuring the legenday Eddy 'Tan Tan' Thornton adding some serious skank on the trumpet, Ska Song is a firm favourite in the live sets and will always make you want to groove.
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(Baby) Hold Me Tonight
original version appears on Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
The third single to be released by the band, (Baby) Hold Me Tight did not feature on the original album but was written more recently by Kitty. Kitty herself takes the helm with vocals and lead guitar, Daisy on Xylophone and with Lewis adding a smattering of jazzy percussion, it's a blues tinged festive treat so warming and beautiful it could even put Scrooge in a Christmassy mood. It also features some smouldering horns performed by Eddy 'Tan Tan' Thornton, a Skatalites contemporary who's played on records for The Beatles, Sandy Shaw, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, Lee 'Scratch' Perry and many more.
There is a cut-away in the theatrical trailer for the benchmark 1956 motion picture "Rock Around The Clock," starring Bill Haley and the Comets, where a man asks a girl who is shaking and nearly upside down, "Hey sister, what do you call that exercise you're all doing." The girl, who is in the throes of the moment and beside herself with jumping beans banging around in her body, proudly responds, "It's rock and roll, brother, and we're rocking tonight!" It was a movie that, along with "The Ed Sullivan Show" - which broadcast Elvis Presley's first performance later that same year, was one of the chief catalysts for breaking the idea of rock and roll to households across America that had never seen such a spectacle before, had never witnessed the live power of music that was getting a good name with the devil. The interesting aspect of this rock and roll revolution is that the music that was featured in that movie and what was described as the sound that all the "cats" were listening to was drastically different from what would be deemed rock and roll these days. The rock and roll these days, though, isn't at all what interests one 20-something and two of her teenage siblings, along with their accomplished and debonair father and mother as they make music until the name Kitty, Daisy & Lewis. A movie like "Rock Around The Clock," is the one that would get played to death in the Durham household in North London and it's that clean guitar, no holds barred approach to melodies and rhythms that will absolutely make anyone listening want to walk across a dance floor and hook up with a partner to waltz or foxtrot or just swing close for as long as the night is relatively young. Kitty, Daisy, Lewis, Graeme and Ingrid Durham, along with legendary Jamaican trumpet player Eddie "Tam Tam" Thornton - who has performed with The Rolling Stones, Beatles and more, sink their teeth into a potpourri of timeless musical standards and create many of their own, digging into their deep bag of tricks to blur the lines between every known living and half-dead genre, resurrecting them and melding them into an intoxicating drink. It's one that, when imbibed, will automatically and with no perceptible time lapse, turn you and the clothing that you were wearing into grays, blacks and whites. It will rid you of the colors that you used to have and warp you back into an era that had to be widely imagined through the curved screen of a gray-scaled television set. It will make you drunk again on all of the sounds that you have heard for decades and decades - sounds that are twice and three times as old as you are - but then again, you've not heard them like this, so new and so invigorated. These are young adults, really, latching into styles, harmonies and perceptions that were already becoming unpopular when the baby boomers were still sucking their thumbs and wetting their beds. These are the sounds of great grandparents and even great, great grandparents, coming to us from a new angle, where the sugary sorrows have different meaning and needing to escape from the tribulations of difficult lives before you're too beat down and out is something of an epidemic. We're reminded of the vacant and longing reasons why Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway look across the water at the East Egg. We're reminded of the effervescence of youth. And we're reminded of depression and bringing everything back together, into a salvageable glory, when the nights lights start popping out of the dark and dancing shoes are everywhere. It's a spirit that's alive and you can hear the band - Kitty, Daisy & Lewis - warming up somewhere up ahead.
Kitty, Daisy & Lewis Official Site
Mercer Street Records
