One angry man

“Were you to say to me, we gotta go see this bald guy who plays acoustic guitar and yells at the audience, I’d probably say ‘No, I don’t wanna go’,” admits Ed Hammel with a wry smile. “But if I get ‘em in once, they always come back.”

The 40-something New Yorker is explaining what it is that he does when he takes to the stage. Part Iggy Pop, part Bill Hicks, all entertainment, Ed goes by the name Hamell On Trial and has produced what is undoubtedly one of the albums of the year in the form of the excellent Choochtown.

When he takes to the stage of Whelans for what is a strong contender for gig of the year, he serves up an intoxicating cocktail of songs, lewd jokes and raw soul. For that magical two hours, he can make us believe that Purgatory is a town just outside Limerick and that Heaven is just a phone-call from Hell – for God’s sake, he even had us roleplaying as inmates of Folsom Prison (you had to be there, trust me). He may carry just an acoustic guitar, but this is as far away from your usual singer-songwriter balladry as you can get.

“I don’t really listen to acoustic music,” Hamell admits. “Mostly, I listen to punk rock from the ’70s, although certainly there are people like Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly and Dylan that I do listen to.”

While it may seem intimate, there is nothing lovey-dovey about Hamell’s live performance, although he’s not into sermonising to his audience either.

“It has political elements, but I try to balance the rhetoric with humour,” he smiles. “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It ain’t preachy, though. It’s not Bono, but if he wants to come to the show, that’d be cool.”

While admitting that performing is very “cathartic” for him (“My wife will tell ya, I get weird when I don’t play”), Ed seems much more personable in real life than the Hamell On Trial character of songs like ‘Go Fuck Yourself’, ‘Hamell’s Ramble’ and ‘The Lottery’, or the even scarier characters that make up the other denizens of Choochtown.

“Bob Mould from Husker Du said that although he writes depressing tunes, he’s not a depressed guy. And to me, it is cathartic blood-letting to some extent,” he admits. “The Hammel On Trial character is like me wearing a mask: it has thespian, theatrical qualities of being able to go up there and rage. With the exception of hanging out with my wife, everything I do in my life is a big pain in the ass to get to that point [on stage].

“The guy that is saying ‘Go Fuck Yourself’ is saying it to a guy who abandoned his children and a woman who is selling drugs out of her house,” he pauses. “Sometimes, I’ve had Christians coming up to me and giving me shit about my show. And I’m like ‘Well, if we talk about this a little bit, we actually have the same cause here. I just go about it a different way and obviously I get people who wouldn’t come to your show’. And it is a show: the robes, the incense.

Hamell describes himself self-deprecatingly as a brush salesman, with his songs as the brushes: “It’s aesthetics and commerce, man, and that’s the story of forever”.

So far, the only ‘brushes’ on sale in Europe are the ones on Choochtown (unless you were one of the lucky ones at the gig to get your hands on his live album), but Ed is hopeful that we will see a compilation of the first two Hamell On Trial LPs (originally released on a major but now, sadly, unavailable) later in the year. He is already thinking about the next album proper, however.

“I’m not trying to subvert people’s minds,” he chuckles. “I assume that your minds are already subverted and I’m just trying to entertain the subverted.”

Choochtown is out now on Evangeline Records