CAPTAIN BEEFHEART’S loyal and long-suffering musicians The Magic Band are in the capital for the first time.
The avant garde flipside to a decade too easily limited to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, they play at the Button Factory in Dublin tonight, almost a year after Beefheart’s death.
The experimental group arose from the desert dust of California 40 years ago and opinions on their music are as good as personality tests: do you hear it as noise or marvel at its mutations?
Simpsonscreator Matt Groening rates them as the best band ever. So, what if Beefheart could see tonight's show?
“I think he would sit back in the corner, trying to remain anonymous, and probably say, ‘What the hell are they doing my music for? Let them get their own’!” says drummer John French, who since 2003 has also taken on the singing duties of his mentor.
In 1969, Beefheart incarcerated French and other band members in a house to create the infamous Trout Mask Replicaalbum.
Months later, they emerged to record it note-perfect in a few hours – it is classed as a major work of modern music. Stories about Beefheart and the band have a dark undertone. The singer abused his musicians, drip-feeding them money and food.
Did Dublin ever feature in Beefheart’s imagination? “Who knows what went on inside that imagination of his . . . when he found out I was half-Irish, he was always calling me that ‘effing Irishman’,” adds French.