Influenced by the post-WWII blues of the American South, Ian Anderson (not to be confused with the leader/flutist of Jethro Tull) founded the Bristol blues scene of the 1960’s. Stereo Death Breakdown from 1969 is Anderson’s only full-band LP with the Country Blues Band. The Fledgling reissue has remastered the misplaced masters of Stereo Death Breakdown and added two of Anderson’s contemporary tracks. Though John Peel consistently spun the album, it is no astonishing document lost in the vaults of time.
Like other African American styles that flooded British ports during the 60’s, namely R&B and its creation of the British Invasion, Ian Anderson’s distance from the original source harbors a misunderstanding, a disconnected notion of working within a other-worldly and foreign medium. Weston-super-Mare, where Anderson is from is more culturally dissimilar to the Mississippi Delta than almost anywhere on the planet; I know because my father is from Weston-super-Mare. This cultural disparity is obvious in Anderson’s music and comes off as an asinine reproduction. In the liner notes, Anderson himself even notes, “to me now, it seems that in trying and failing to become something else, we accidentally created something local, of its time.”
Cultural appropriation is a common trend in popular British music, but with acts such as The Beatles, The Pretty Things, and The Rolling Stones, the imitation of American R&B was channeled through a uniquely British sound: whereas the country blues scene of 1960’s Britain was nothing more than a feeble facsimile. Quite frankly, why listen to an imitation when you can listen to Sleepy John Estes, Robert Pete Williams, Charley Patton and Mississippi John Hurt play the original sound more inventively, passionately and with a genuine connection to the issues and struggles being excavated. When compared to the African American sound of the post-Civil Rights Era, white British country blues is utterly pathetic and unauthentic.
Bardos Freedoom
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