I must say I’ve heard the name a few times but didn’t know anything about the man and his music. I was pleasantly surprised when this smart, clipped but slightly strange individual took to the stage, walking around like Vivian Stanshall doing Bryan Ferry, stepping lightly around the stage like a cat.
His songs and his persona shower you with references. Within minutes my head was full of names – Stuart Staples/Tindersticks, Divine Comedy, Jacques Brel, Scott Walker, Bryan Ferry, Nick Cave, Baby Bird etc
But by the second song I was thinking only of one man. The man himself. Looking like a Victorian/Edwardian man of means, he has a unique approach to his songs. He doesn’t just sing them – he acts them, like mini vignettes – slices of a life slightly askance, almost imagined. Marmaduke Dando Hutchings is a creation, a force of nature, a sideshow freak, a dandy aesthete, with one pointed shoe in this world and the rest in some nether world of Victorian ephemera, and between the wars music hall. He reminds me of the Glass Eaters books of G.W Dahlquist – both real and ridiculously far-fetched, ludicrous yet compelling.
There is much clever wordplay in the lyrics, yearning for a better time. There is sickness and darkness, humour and desire. There is subtlety and beauty in the delicate tunes, and there is artifice and fantasy and a will to hold up a mask to the world and show you a Punch and Judy show of idealised life. A life that seems somehow more monochrome and dull than that which is pictured. It is darker yet more beautiful, richer, though more evil than this one. An exaggeration and a distortion of life, presented as art – it touches but is not touched. It exists in it’s own time and space and is not affected by the real life that surrounds it – like a museum.
Welcome to the world of Marmaduke Dando Hutchings – a looking glass world of objet d’art, scientific journals and monocles, old manuscripts and half drunk bottles of gin, all carefully placed for greatest effect by a mind who wants you to believe that it’s all real. Or is it?
I had the great fortune once to witness a concert by a band called Persecution Complex – a mixture of art school freaks playing complex glam riffs over almost prog chops. Two young sisters led the band on guitar and voice respectively. Chesca providing alto range vocals – beautiful and glamorous and powerful, and Becca with her 2-tone hair and a scary dedication to inspirational riffage. I manages to acquire a 3 track demo tape which I played over and over, and still to this day it remains in my mp3 player and always gives me a thrill when it comes up on random.
Well let me tell you that the sisters have done some growing up and now front The Murder Barn. Their influences have spread like tentacles to include the organic depths of Nick Cave/P.J. Harvey/Tom Waits.
To listen to the Murder Barn is like taking a journey by sea to an unknown shore in the company of strangers with a leery glint in the eye. You might not feel safe, your drink might have been spiked, and your wallet may be gone in the morning, but you will feel somehow the better for the experience, and your life will be forever enriched.
I have to say that in Chesca Dolecka we have a female singer quite unsurpassed in the current music scene. She is both beautiful and powerful, a mixture of Joan Baez and Grace Slick, a voodoo queen, a Waterhouse heroine, a Rousseau dream. In her demeanour there are elements of the folk dreams of Albion with it’s pagan magic rituals, and Thomas Hardy style village heroines. But there is also gypsy fire and Haitian devils and New Orleans mondo trash.
The music has the voodoo vibe of tex mex, and the European Transylvanian gypsy dances. To see the Murder Barn is to witness a ritual, with all it’s catholic pomp and guilt catharsis, as well as its Sufi dervish and African trance. It is power, dark and terrifying, yet spiritually uplifting.
The band look great (despite every male member sporting beards!) – all red and black and dark burlesque. The musicianship is cohesive and supportive, with heavy riffs and sea shanty rhythms, distorted organ stabs, Duane Eddy style twangs and rolling accordion washes.
If you are a fan of the glorious Technicolor of the Hammer films, along with the sinister paganism of the Wicker Man. If you occasionally dress up as a pirate and enjoy the feeling of being a rebel on the rolling seas, or if you dream of bodice ripping heroines and Daphne Du Maurier Cornish Inns. Or if you prefer your music blood red and appreciate the art of Lorca and Frida, or if you’ve ever loved the Spanish toreador and the surrealism of Picasso/Dali. If you want music that is powerful and moves you like an ocean wave and you like female singers whose prose and vibrato can rip out your heart and caress it’s curves…then listen to the Murder Barn.
