Erk Alors

Erk AlorsWhat in the name of the wee man does Erk Alors mean, for a start? Well, greybeards will remember The Lone Groover strip cartoon in one of the music weeklies, back when they were still newspapers, who was fond of saying “Erk alors!” How far does that take us? Not very, I’m afraid. So, having established that no one knows what the name meant, what was the band all about? The answer would appear to be angst ridden, rage against the machine passion, and the ongoing and increasingly desperate search for that elusive hook; or so it seems with the benefit of 21st Century hindsight. How much of that was obvious in a Scotland where snake belts had just gone out of fashion, it’s now impossible to say.What did they sound like? If you mentioned the word “ethereal”, you’d most likely get a slap in the dish for being pretentious. Erk Alors would hate this review, that’s for sure, because they were, amongst other things, very, very grounded. Real music, by real musicians, about real issues, for real people, that was their credo, that was their raison d’etre, that was their motivation. They didn’t get where they were yesterday by bandying words about. Well, actually, they did, but not for them the airy-fairy hypothetical theorising of the shoegazers; more like the in-your-face politics of love and life written by a survivor of the traumas and ecstasies of both. Take the brash honesty of The Proclaimers, add a very generous splash of Gallic passion (not quite Brel, but perhaps his wee brother- a sort of frere Jacques, if you will), stir in a bucket load of good, old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, and garnish with tears, and you’ll get somewhere near the essence of the Erk Alors sound. Who wants songs about joy? Well, lots of people, as it turned out, but pandering to the tastes of the paying public was not so much distasteful to Erk Alors as anathema. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it, thank you very much, and do please shut the door on the way out. They might well have added, “and be quick about it”. Tolerating fools gladly was not part of the plan. However, it would be a mistake to consider them arrogant; yes, they were sure of themselves and their material, but only because they agonised over each and every word and note before it saw the light of day. If you got to hear it, it was finished.Recorded, you have to look no further than their 1994 album “The Secret Life Of…”. From the opening bars of “Never Wanted To” (starts like an anthem, ends like an opera), to the dark dancefloor beats of “Only In A Dream”, via the superlative sardonic snarl of “Satisfied”, all human life is here. Live, they were intense. If you wanted fun, you were in the wrong place. Laughs at an Erk Alors gig were as rare as a Morpheus smile. At times as rough as Tom Waits’ larynx, at other times machine-like in their precision, the live experience was usually highly charged, often enervating, always different. You knew you’d been to see a live band when you’d been to an Erk Alors gig.Let the thing burn, indeed. .................Syd Fox. .......This music is shared on the understanding that Malcolm McGonigle and Erk Alors retain copyright on this recorded work. Any public use of the music for commercial purposes must be cleared with Malcolm McGonigle and Erk Alors. The author of the work must be credited on any public use of this music.