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Half Deaf Clatch—Under A Western Sky—Speak Up
Recordings

I really doubt that there are any more prolific artists in the UK
than Mr Andrew McClatchie - aka Half Deaf Clatch. I really have
no idea how many albums he has made -it must be dozens- but
each of them is as good, sometimes better, than the last.

This one is a cracker. It ain’t blues, more like those movie
soundtracks (eg. Paris, Texas) done by Ry Cooder yonks ago.
So…very blueslike then, if not roots.

The four tracks here tell a tale of what appears to have been a
natural disaster, a solar flare; That flare has all but destroyed
our world.
Seen through the eyes of a survivor, “…barely surviving from day to day” and obliged to wear a
mask and goggles to “shield me from the daylight”, this is a searing tale. Following the sun
“scorching the unsuspecting sky” he has spent seven years in a bunker with his father. They
leave. The older man dies a year later.

The un-named man wanders alone, but much like Noah seeing a dove on the wing after ‘the
deluge’, the man has seen a bird flying above—but it is a vulture!

I repeat, this is a cracker. The lyrics are stunning, the music etherial and accomplished. Even
the bleached cover (a picture of somwhere in Arizona, I suspect) carries a bleak and forlorn
message.

OMG Clatch! You give me the creeps.

Ian K McKenzie
Duran—30 Scratchy Backroads Blues—Electric Gospel
Records

Twelve tracks here not 30 (?) and they are only ‘scratchy’ in a
figurative rather than a literal sense, as they echo the music of
yesteryear.

Naito Duran Haruhisa is a Japanese musician, singer-
songwriter and guitarist born of a Japanese mother and
Spanish-Filipino father. A child prodigy, he learned the piano
at 3 and the guitar at 14. He has made a career in Japan
performing as a virtuoso axeman.

He has here turned his hands to blues and does a fine job of it
too. The music ranges from a version of Robert Johnson’s
non-blues ‘They’re Red Hot’ (featuring guitar work by June Yamagishi), through an excellent
acoustic rendition of Charley Patton’s ‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’, and a nice version of Janis
Joplin’s ‘Mary Jane Blues’ (Mary Jane is a name for marijuana/weed). Echoes of Django here -
but too short!.

There is some of Duran’s own music (now a single too) in ‘Jojo’s Echo Blues’ which has a rather
strange coda in French. There is a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’ with some really nice
axe work. Ms Ilana Katz Katz, a jazz/blues/roots fiddler from Boston is on this one too. Too far
back in the mix for me.
Ignore the misleading title. This is the living proof that Blues is an international music form.

Ian K McKenzie