JD Meatyard - Live on the Independents Tour 2015

I hadn't realised just how much we needed a JD Meatyard live album.  In John Donaldson's recorded work, he's capable of pinning down the world with all the precision of a knife-thrower skimming his blade just past his accomplice's ear,  And when he has someone other than an accomplice to throw at, he tends to make sure he hits.

Live, he doesn't lose any of that, but adds much.  Combining the spirit of a crazed preacher and Phil Ochs after someone lit him on fire, Donaldson reels off his retorts at the modern establishment with a combustible precision that leaves compromise floundering on the floor like a spend beast and the victims of his ire branded.   You don't forget a JD Meatyard live performance and you certainly don't leave it with any uncertainties about where he stands.

All of which makes this live album a more than welcome addition to a body of recorded work that, from his days in Levellers 5, now spans close to thirty years.   He certainly hasn't mellowed with age - if anything, the opposite.Donaldson fires off a classic from his Calvin Party days - 'Lies, Lies & Government' - with, it seems, greater ferocity than ever and the spirit is matched in a caustic rendition of 'Taking The Asylum'.

 

Yet that he can combine this with the deeply human tale of 'Anna Had a Kid' and the confessional 'Sorry Song' illustrates his extraordinary depth both as a songwriter and a performer.  There's no sense of a lull in proceedings or an opportunity to get the beers in while you wait for the next polemical outburst: he takes his audience and his listener with him.  Mistakes are part of the human condition, he's saying: those who use that exploit that condition for gain and subterfuge are those that deserve our ire.

 

The performance reaches a brilliant crescendo in the form of a seven minute version of 'Standing on the Shoulders of Better Men', JD's warm and self-deprecating paean to his musical heroes.  It's quite a list, as you'd expect, spanning Beefheart, Johns Cale and Coltrane, Prince Far-I and Mark E. Smith among others.  His honest placing of himself, Newton-like, on the beach as this musical tide washes up to his feet provides a telling punctuation mark to this performance.  Mine is but one of many tales, he seems to be saying; my answer yet one of many answers.  'If you don't think that you're a fucking idiot,' he announces as the song nears its end.

 

His may be one of many messages, but it's a deeply compelling one and  this is a deeply compelling collection. 

 

Get it from https://germanshepherdrecords.bandcamp.com/album/live-on-the-independents-tour-2015-3-2. 

21 Songs for John: 11 - JD Meatyard

JD Meatyard – Taking Over the Asylum

Following Calvin Party's split, John Donaldson quickly re-emerged with this project, which proved to at least as good as anything he's done before while to some, including me, it's produced some of his very best work.   JD Meatyard contributed the brilliantly evocative 'Olive Tree', perhaps the most poignant comment ever on the plight of the Palestine people, to Dandelion Radio's fifth anniversary compilation in 2011 and that became the first of three tracks to make the festive fifty.  They've recorded two excellent albums for Probe Plus and have another one due for release late in 2014, which will feature a version of this track, available for the first time here. 

https://www.facebook.com/jdmeatyard

21 Songs for John

Best Albums of 2013: 6. JD Meatyard

6. Northern Songs - JD Meatyard (Probe Plus)

No other collection in the vast discography of John Donaldson showcases the extraordinary breadth of his vision like this.  The former Levellers 5/Calvin Party main man is currently making the best music of his long career as JD Meatyard and Northern Songs is its finest outpouring thus far.  Teasingly, though, he opens so many different possibilities in this album that you sense the future might see him plundering still richer artistic territory.  We'll see.

For now, this'll do just fine.  It takes us from the fervent, uncompromising political comment of 'Jesse James' and 'A Political Song (Blow It Out Yr Arse) all the way through to the intensely personal emotions of 'Sweet Wine' and 'Jesus Call' and every stop on the way reveals yet another masterfully crafted layer and suggests those reservoirs of rich possibilities still to come.

Get it directly from Probe Plus here.

JD Meatyard - Northern Songs

You could make a good case for claiming that John Donaldson's JD Meatyard project is yielding his best work to date, better even that what he produced with the remarkable Calvin Party and Levellers 5.  A remarkable, even contentious claim, but if his debut album hinted at its truth, Northern Songs states it boldly.

Donaldson has matured into a singer-songwriter of remarkable power and versatility.  Here, he moves with ease between the gently romantic 'Dance With You', for instance, to the bluntly acerbic 'A Political Song (Blow It Out Your Arse)', showing an artistic dexterity it's hard to imagine many even attempting.  Ditto, the courageous honesty of' 'Jesus Call' or the humility of 'Standing on the Shoulders of Better Men', where he runs through a roll-call of great artists and comes up with some of the most poetic comments ever written on the subject of Mark E. Smith, to name just one.  It's fitting that the title of the song adapts a quote from Bernard of Chartres that's more popularly attributed to Isaac Newton because a balancing of the spiritual and the material gives a metaphysical framework to JD Meatyard's work that few can approach.  It's this that raises him well above the run of the mill political observer, not that there are enough of them around at the moment anyway.

I've chosen to play the powerful 'Jesse James' in my October show on Dandelion Radio this month.  That's partly because I've already played a lot of the other songs here over the months building up to this release and partly because it's an irresistibly forceful retort to the crisis in modern capitalism that's always been there and which those with an interest in sustaining it are hell-bent on covering up.  The need for an outlaw figure to take back, literally in these times, money that's been taken from the poor and given to the rich becomes, in John Donaldson's hands, a political move so urgent it's disturbing there's a shortage of similar voices, a suggestion lent force by this sparse yet powerful guitar-driven clarion call.  Yet it's a sign of this artist's considerable scope that he can make a song like 'One Last Waltzing' sound just as imperative in its potential to rescue the human condition.

JD Meatyard lives in a world in which governments have witnessed the spectacular collapse of an economy driven by greed, plugged the gap using public money and then blamed public spending for the crisis in the first place.  And they look like they're getting away with it.  It's the same world you live in too.  His manifesto is Northern Songs, an album that calls up political outrage and human tenderness as two sides of the same coin and, as such, it's one of the most important artistic statements of the age.

Get it from the Probe Plus store here.

You can still hear the session JD Meatyard did for my September Dandelion Radio show here.