Arrival Tigers: A Correct Review of ‘The Spirit Salon’

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1. Vital Tigers.

All my life, I’ve done everything I can to avoid having a hairstyle. Now, aged 26, and I can’t stop opening bank accounts. Somewhere between this and that lies (in both senses) Idle Tigers, and their debut album, The Spirit Salon. Idle Tigers (deeply suspect) is/are Rose Hawkins, or Ross Hawkins, a dear friend of mine who over the years I’ve watched fashion his self from lesson-disrupting jolly football hooligan into expatriate dandy-lion by what you might if you’re that way inclined (journalist) call sheer force of will. I prefer to say, by sheer force of hairstyle. Notably, as Ross the ghostly Yorkshire bastard has blossomed, so his hair has, by the law of averages, shortened. He’s rarely, if ever, succeeded in growing a beard; and I know for a fact he did try at least once to do so, a process he correctly described (via txt, and without any abbreviation) as “trying to look like a wolf”. This didn’t work, and thus Idle Tigers were born.

Or that’s how I like to look at it. ‘The Spirit Salon’ consists of sixteen tracks and is forty-six minutes long, which means that had it been released fifteen years ago, I’d have suffered considerable anxiety over the fact that it wouldn’t quite fit on to one side of a 90-minute cassette tape. Fortunately, ‘The Spirit Salon’ wasn’t released fifteen years ago: it was released 119 years ago, in 1889, on a wax cylinder, and it was almost pink. Nobody bought a copy. Nobody at all. Manners, patience.

2. Suicidal Tigers.

All this of course is deducible through a priori reasoning but if that sort of thing doesn’t float your overcoat, listen to this: ‘The Spirit Salon’, like some kind of sordid work of great literature, has a prologue. It’s called ‘Prologue’. I was one of a choice few chosen to perform on this prologue but I’m also one of choicer few from among that choice few who chose not to perform. Phew. There’s really no way I could have done it justice, my natural inclination towards songs being, after all, to sing them. Singing was apparently given an invitation to the Spirit Salon only as an act of common courtesy. Ross himself doesn’t actually sing his songs at all: he voices them. Articulates them. Here and there, such as on ‘The Small Electrical Lieutenant’ and ‘Organ Grinders’, he even just about raps them. Special. Singing, when it rears its sexy head (Ross, you see, appreciates better than the rest of us the vastness of the canyon between beautiful and sexy) comes through a different mouth, that of Alaska Blue most effectively on ‘My Girlfriend Was Insulted By A Futurist Artist’:

“He liked his modernism high and hard
he was the cock of the avant-garde”

and believe you me, this is a lady who really understands that ‘cock’ is a four-letter word.

3. Bridal Tigers.

‘The Spirit Salon’ is a fragrant, luxurious place for your ears and imagination to spend 46 minutes (it’s actually one of very, very few albums you can just as easily listen to with your nose) where not one of the myriad of motley characters would dare do anything as vulgar as actually, say, be evil. The undercurrent of outsider eroticism (“adolescent sexual encounters behind hedges”, as the prologue puts it) flows out of ‘My Girlfriend…’ and ‘Put Your Trousers On’ right through to ‘Unlace Me Behind the Hedge’ and finally trickles away down the cracks of ‘Light Entertainer in Prison’ (or, ‘Sympathy for the Perverts’?) ending just where eroticism itself ends, in marriage, in ‘Lord Byron’s Marriage’. None of the misfits in the Spirit Salon are ostracised or shamed; even the Granddad who “used to toddle through the park without his trousers on”, harmlessly upsetting the kids, is only gently mocked because he “got it wrong”. This goes nowhere towards explaining why ‘The Spirit Salon’ didn’t sell in the Victorian era when it was originally released and to which it will forever belong, with all its experimental decadence, fairy-pretty folklore and garrulous anxiety: still, on the other (lace-gloved) hand, all this is explained by the line that’s probably at least one of Idle Tigers’ (insincere) manifestos, “the idea is to make people look stupid, no-one ever achieved a single thing by trying” (‘Giving Up The Ghost’).

There’s more wordy wit here than you’d get if you locked Oscar Wilde in the kitchen forever with 400 tins of alphabet spaghetti and every fridge magnet ever made – and for all I know, that’s precisely the sort of thing Ross gets up to in vast Canada in the evenings:

“You’re in danger from a thief,
from an angel cutting teeth
cashing in on light relief
and leading us to war” (‘The Small Electrical Lieutenant’)

“Jonah said, ‘I’m fleeing God’s authoritative stare’,
The sailor threw him overboard and said, ‘like fuck you are’.” (‘Jonah’)

“Where do you want me to touch you?’ she said.
‘Here, by the side of the road’, I said”. (‘Unlace Me Behind the Hedge’)

“They were cruel about my last performances,
they said unpleasant things about my private life.
They’re rush-releasing my biography
with a message of support from my ex-wife”. (‘Light Entertainer in Prison’)

Thank you, good night, I hate you all – and all in all, in all in all, in all, ‘The Spirit Salon’ is subversively, bewilderingly, bashfully, aristocratically, delightfully, wonderfully ridiculous. From the womandolin techno-barn dance of ‘My Girlfriend Was Insulted By a Futurist Artist’ to the harpsichord electronica of ‘Barnaby’s Visit’; from the red-brick Gameboy lullaby of ‘Every Young Lad Needs Mates’ to the neo-reggae hip-fop-hop of ‘The Small Electrical Lieutenant’ and the toy piano Sunday afternoon at a National Trust stately home with your auntie day-nightmare of ‘Treat Me Like a Fairy’, the music of The Spirit Salon doesn’t benefit from comparison to anything else: but as with all great pop music, the music isn’t really the point at all.

You should buy a copy, because it’s good.

***
Pee-ess: If you’re not English, you can buy a copy here. It should also be available on iTunes but it isn’t, or not yet anyway.

Idle Tigers / The Spirit Salon / Ross Hawkins / Le Grand Magistery

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