Stephen Coates had a pair of bizarre dreams. In them, he was visited by film actress Tuesday Weld and 1930s British jazz singer Al Bowlly. From the mysterious reverie, Coates decided that he would donate his life to music and would submerge himself in another time in order to come up with a unique, gratifying sound. With keenness and a magic trunk full of tricks, Coates became The Real Tuesday Weld and the rest… well, that’s history, isn’t it?
Describing the quintessence of The Real Tuesday Weld can be a bit of a pickle, although there is something about Coates that seems from another time. It is as though Bowlly inhabited his soul that night during the dream and never let go. Coates’ music is infused with a sense of jazz theatre, with touches of Tin Pan Alley cheek thrown in for kicks.
With Coates’ latest release, The London Book of the Dead, he takes his whimsy, his moxie, and his gee-golly-goodness to a whole new level.
Evocative, intricate, layered, immersive, riveting, forceful, affecting, tart, passionate, and sinister, The London Book of the Dead reads, at times, like the score to a silent movie and, at other times, like something wholly modern and wholly dreamlike. Coates is narrator, ringleader, conductor, and carny barker. He is the consummate showman and we are his spectators. And you can bet he has our attention.
The title references Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and carries the theme of the passage of a soul from one life to another. In effect, Coates’ record is about the course of the spiritual to the new. It is about change, yet he isn’t hesitant to mete out a dark sense of humour on the whole thing.
Transferring the thoughtful Tibetan spirituality of Bardo Thodol to the locale of London, Coates can’t help but find the process comical. “I thought it would be funny if there were a book like that for the English,” he says. “The album felt like that to me – a way of moving from one state to another and all set against the backdrop of this city.”
Discussing topics like religion, love, death, drugs, life, and disease is risky business, particularly within a musical milieu that sounds as though it was influenced by a hotchpotch of Tim Burton, pantomime, bowler hats, and musical theatre. Yet Coates does it marvelously, invoking a sense of earnestness and shade in conjunction with his dry smartness.
Perhaps the most compelling facet of The Real Tuesday Weld is how rapidly and naturally he moves from realism to surrealism in a musical context. A track like “Dorothy Parker Blue” is emotional, gentle, and stirring. Smoothly, Coates slips into a hopping-mad spectacle of a ditty in “Cloud Cuckooland” and rolls deliciously into the “jazz hands” pace of “Kix.” The transitions flow like a dream, stylishly.
In the end, that’s really what The London Book of the Dead is about.
Deconstructing this bit into a selection of songs degrades the process, I think. Instead, listen for the transitions, the mood changes, the enthusiasm, the euphoria, the fashion, and the dark edges. The Real Tuesday Weld has put together a piece of art that is pensive without being insufferable and dark without being disheartening. It is an exciting, imaginative album.
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