Private Radio

Forget all the wisecracks about actors with guitars, six degrees of Kevin Bacon and Keanu Reeves. Billy Bob Thornton has much more in common with Sam Shepard, a guy who started off as a drummer, ran out of options, learned how to carve stories out of dark Americana and took acting gigs to make the rent. Consequently Private Radio should be appraised as part of a body of work that includes Slingblade and a mesmerising performance in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, hence the nine minute talking blues total recall of ‘Beauty At The Back Door’ which paints the singer’s childhood abode with “a little old dried up garden and some woods way on back”, “an old wood floor bowed up just about everywhere” and “a snake stick . . . ‘cos if you wanted to go outside you’d usually need it”.

There are a lot of ghosts on this waveband. The opening ‘Dark And Mean’ finds Billy Bob spooked, alone at night in a house with too many doors “watching the dark get mad” in waltz time. The effect is Johnny Cash on drugs, Leonard Cohen gone off the grid. In ‘Forever’ he’s located in a bordertown waffle house “under the influence of Merle Haggard”, wearing a pair of his girlfriend’s pink panties (the ones with the feathers on the edge in case you were curious), chuckling about being pulled over by a cop who thought he looked like a guy with something to hide.

The slower, smokier stuff is the best. ‘Walk Of Shame’ and ‘Smoking In Bed’ are strong rollicking songs, but the straight-shooting production doesn’t do them any favours. The title tune, derived from an Angelina Jolie anecdote about a near death experience, is Songs Of Love And Hate by way of Kris Kristofferson trying to stay upright under the weight of Sunday morning coming down.

Throw in faithful covers of ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ delivered both as a tribute to Sweetheart era Byrds and JFK, plus ‘Lost Highway’, no longer a chickenwire standard so much as a rosary passed down from sinner to sinner, and you’ve got a magnetic debut.