Interested parties will know the back story by now. Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp – a serious connoisseur of gypsy music, lest he be accused of actorly dilettantism – both got deeper into seafaring lore than is either sane or sanitary, and vowed to put together a record of maritime airs. Enter polymath producer Hal Willner, the latter-day link between the two Harrys Smith and Partch, and a man whose approach to themed albums (previous subjects include Poe, Mingus, Burroughs, Weill and more, every one a classic) bears more relation to the staging of bizarre interplanetary radio plays than the usual mixum-gatherums.
The result, Rogues Gallery, can be roughly – if fancifully – described as a Hallowe’en masqued ball staged on a decrepit ghost galleon. Featuring a cast of hundreds arrayed over two albums and 43 tunes, it’s an unruly assembly whose various belchings, bilgings and bemoanings lurch in tone and timbre from the bawdy to the doleful. Indeed, the prevailing refrain is Tom Waits’ assessment of The Pogues’ playing on Rum Sodomy & The Lash as sounding like sailors on shore leave. A pungent reek clings to these songs like the smell of the fishheads and tails strewn throughout Brel’s ‘Port Of Amsterdam’.
So, you get Gavin Friday doing an unexpurgated, addictive and absolutely filthy ‘Baltimore Whores’, closely rivalled in the ribaldry stakes by Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Good Ship Venus’. You’ve got Nick Cave bellowing about the scourge of the syph (‘Fire Down Below’) while Baby Gramps does Beefheart-on-sea (“Now the Cape Cod girls don’t use no pills/They get their pep from the codfish gills”).
It gets weirder. Character actor par excellence John C. Reilly acquits himself with honours on a brace of tunes, the wonderfully named Jack Shit rollicks through ‘Boney Was A Warrior’ with utter contempt for folk protocol, while Jarvis Cocker contributes the distortion-heavy dirge ‘A Drop Of Nelson’s Blood’ (Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of rum after he was killed in the Battle Of Trafalgar; legend has it that when the ship put to port, the body was intact but the rum was all gone). All that’s missing is Ralph Steadman popping in to supply grisly visuals. Hang on, that is Ralph Steadman, singing the devil out of a macabre ballad from a time when it was technically legal to eat the cabin boy if supplies ran out.
But it’s not all wanton grotesquerie. This is also a scholarly folk artefact, albeit one divested of the preciousness that occasionally plagues such endeavours. Hence the inclusion of craftsmen and women from northern English folk streams (Richard Thompson, Eliza and Martin Carthy, Bryan Ferry and Sting shucking off their respective designer baggage), and a handful of artists who apparently drifted in off Nova Scotia trade routes: the McGarrigles and Wainwrights, plus – praise be! – the divine Mary Margaret O’ Hara, frozen as a figurehead on a prow, approximating the loveliest, loneliest bowed saw you never heard on ‘The Cry Of Man’. Mind you, she’s closely matched for pathos by Andrea Corr, who operates a capella and exhibits exquisite ornamentation on ‘Caroline And Her Young Sailor Bold’.
There are a few misfires, but overall Rogues Gallery works as a sort of calenture, an aural hallucination where the eschatological meets the scatological, where Elizabethan smut gets censored by Victorian prudes and reinserted by wicked historians, where laments become rave-ups soused with the overwhelming reek of brandy, whale blubber, bodily fluids, broken hearts and bloated cadavers.
There’s another one of these due out next year. Consider me press-ganged.