Wreckless Eric plays the Pig
JUDE MONTAGUE
On a dark October night, just before a storm, we stood on White Rock seafront watching for the main act to drive up. It’s a great moment before a gig, full of nervous energy. Then there are the processes of getting the gear in, lifting it, setting up, sound checks. No tour machine, no hands were employed to help. We were doing this event ourselves, the biggest name we had put on here so far. Tickets had sold well, many to those who had been in the audience for the original Stiff tour, the stuff of legend. This turned out, though, to be far more than a nostalgic reverie.
Indeed, it was a thrill to be able to promote Wreckless Eric on his recent tour. Those of us who were there experienced something magic that evening. It felt like one of those occasions when you know you are witnessing an artist at the top of their game. Eric Goulden, aka Wreckless Eric, was born in Newhaven and brought up in Peacehaven, a land he once described vividly as full of bungalows. In Hastings, we gave him the welcome a native poet deserves in his homeland. I was relieved. I was proud.
Eric’s new album Leisureland (Tapete Records, 2023) is inspired by life on the South Coast, by boyhood frustrations and dreams, by love of American music, by stories of ignorance and exploitation. He has created a fictitious town called Standing Water, full of the air of a decaying seaside – slot machines, seagull-shouty promenades, reckless wind and waves. This night he sang those songs. He’s not an artist stuck in the past but a poet of the present, sharing his life experiences, evoking vividly the life of a small-town boy growing up in wild lands of bungalow outbacks.
Eric has been a prolific artist, and the last time I interviewed him he had released his (pre-Covid) album Construction Time & Demolition, perhaps a more free-form work. Eric appeared on Later . . . with Jools Holland (BBC) on Saturday 14 October 2023, singing not only his classic hit Whole Wide World (1977) but tracks from this, his nineteenth album.
I was moved by the live rendition of a song about Radium Girls in the USA, female factory workers who developed radiation sickness from painting watch dials and hands with luminous paint. The women ingested deadly amounts after being instructed to point their brushes on their lips to give a fine tip. The lyrics were delivered with passion and point. You had to be there.
VINTAGE ERIC
Eric played acoustic and electric guitar with a vintage valve amp turned way up. He was very much in control of his guitar sound, which was full and varied, and when he needed the effects, overdriven and saturated. As a one-man act he had a complete sound, honed by playing bars throughout the USA. In between the numbers he told stories of being on the road, the motels, the swimming pools, the wild, wide-open spaces crossing from East to West, the depressingly visceral nature of modern America.
Young Eric Goulden, in his Peacehaven bungalow, looked to great American artists – Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen – for inspiration. That night I was inspired by this songwriter, who was born and raised down the road of my hometown, and consider myself lucky to have been that night in The Pig back room; there among the paintings of US independence that hang eerily around those walls, reflecting the legacy of that area called America Ground, once home to itinerants, radicals, and dissidents, considered ‘outside’.
Wreckless Eric appeared courtesy of Montague Armstrong at The Pig on Wednesday 25 October 2023. His album Leisureland (Tapete, 2023) is available now.
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