The Pale King Returns

CW Stoneking comes out all guns blazing against “Communist military brainwash music”
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And with some true detective work you can see a few things have changed.

For one, CW Stoneking is six years sober. Another strange development is his son is an LFMAO fan. I’ll never type a more disturbing sentence than that, period.

“Yeah one of my boys Ishmael likes this ‘Every day I’m shuffling?’” Stoneking asks, to see if he’s got it down verbatim. “He’s got this little dance move he does. It sounds to me like some Communist military brainwash music. It’s not my cup of tea but that’s alright, I’d prefer he does that than plays video games,” he says affectionately. On his third “rekkid” (CW grew up with Aboriginal kids in Papunya in regional WA, hence the twang), Gon’ Boogaloo, he’s gone EDM, Eccentric Dance Music.

“Dance music has been electronic for the past thirty years. Eccentric Dance Music sounds better. I’ve never been a dancer, I picked up the geeetar so I wouldn’t have to dance,” he explains. “If I could dance like James Brown I’d do that going to the Milk Bar,” he enthuses, countering “I think I’m doing one thing and I catch sight of myself in the mirror and I’m doing another thing altogether. I try and blot it out,” he says. Incidentally, CW stands for “Stanley Rogers.” Of course it does.

Australian singer CW Stoneking is The Pale King. And he’s retutrned.
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King Hokum (2005) and Jungle Blues (2008) both exhumed this colourful character from the ‘20s – more 45rpm than MP3 – jive talking over blues, Dixieland, Doo Wop, Calypso, Motown and all kinds of ballyhoo. For Gon’ Boogaloo, his long-gestating third album, the 38 year old (seriously) has headed into Phil Spector doo-wop territory and wants you to Get On The Floor. This bitsa’s brought the hits, ya!

“I’m not into all these raves and things like that, this is a rock’n’roll dance rekkid,” he says. And what a LP it is, the first album to ever be Longlisted in the $ 30,000 Coopers Australian Music Prize before its official release date.

Enough of my jibber jabber, let’s let the ‘King talk.

“The rekkid’s deceptive, my track listing’s so good it disguises the fact there’s so many different kinds of music on the rekkid, it’s sexy-like. If someone jumbled up the tracklisting they’d never be able to put it back together again. Like if your guts fell out you could never fit them back in again. It’s more coherent than you think,” he reckons.

“The Jungle Swing is a funny little tune. It’s a cheap little number, like a song you’ll find in a cereal box. I brought a drummer in and I use him because he’s actually a percussionist, he played on the Jungle Blues rekkid. Some of the stuff he’s done has been swimming around in my head this last year so anyhow when we got to this number he came up with a nice cowbell rhythm. It turned out rather well I thought, it inspired me to write udder bits,” he says, his twang milking out the pun with a firm squirt.

CW Stoneking had a logjam of songs built up.
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Amazingly, after six years of build-up the album was recorded in just two days. “I got Vika and Linda in and Paul Kelly’s daughters (Memphis and Madeline) too, they’re all singing on it. Paul Kelly’s daughters are gon’ come on tour with me.

“I started writing the word Boogaloo when I was sitting in Brunswick before I even moved to England,” he says, now he’s “I just liked that stupid word, the song didn’t even turn out too good. That word Boogaloo, I said it more times in the original version than I do now. That song Gon’ Boogaloo was like my wrestling partner over the years, I kept going back trying to wrangle something good out of it,” he drawls. The Zombie will be the most entertaining live song on this tour, the Kelly Gang will do a petrified scream in unison with the crowd.

Hold onto your hats.

“I came up with the song The Zombie because I shouted it out when I was working myself up and trying to get a song. I had a recording and I worked on it a while, I got close to recording it but I didn’t like the long sections of it, it was so boring and lifeless,” he says. “Last time I was in Melbourne I thought ‘This song is a dud’ then I went back and said ‘What were all the bits I cut out?’

“I went through my old recordings and I found this section that sounded good and then I wrote some words (singing like a tall-story-telling granpaw) ‘Oh when you hear that Zombie’ and I popped it all back together with that original juice. It’s dark because there’s genuine horror at the world contained in that song.”

That horror isn’t so much at ISIS and Hornets flying off to sting anyone that gets in there way. “It’s worse than that, we’ve gotta worry about the people we’ve got inside the country with the white faces. That’s one of the difficulties about making this rekkid, I’ve wanted to make a party rekkid but I’ve been depressed since, I don’t know, all this bullsh-t began, it just keeps getting worse.”

Stoneking is puffing on a pipe and looking out from a ghoulish white face on the album cover too.

“I was sitting on my porch, smoking my pipe then I had an idea and ran into the bathroom and got some nappy rash cream and some mascara and mocked up my face then my wife got home, she was picking up the kids from kindergarten and I looked like a mad person,” he laughs. “We took some snaps and I sent them down to a photographer in Melbourne and we drove down the next day and got the moneyshot.”

Album cover: Gon’ Boogaloo – CW Stoneking(Caroline).
Source: Supplied

REVIEW:

Gon’ Boogaloo

CW Stoneking

(Caroline)

4 stars.

All this confabulation about EDM aside, CW Stoneking makes Eccentric Dance Music on his third record, one he described as “a headf- of gargantuan proportions”. The bitsa has a penchant for myth-making and on Jungle Swing, after he barks like a dog and (probably) convulses wildly, he notes, “I’ve got a wife who loves me and a girlfriend too.” He uses ragtime, doo-wop (Vika and Linda & Paul Kelly’s daughters all guest) and gives the whole shebang a propulsive groove to get you moving. The Zombie is the pick. You can hear C-Dubya properly hurting on Mama Got the Blues, falling away from the mic, letting out every last wisp of pipe-smoke. Jungle Man lets the energy dissipate, he swings on the vine one too many times.

That aside, this is epoch(al), hips.

HEAR: Gon’ Boogaloo (Caroline) out now.

SEE: CW Stoneking, The Forum, 154 Flinders St, city. Nov 15. $ 48. ticketmaster.com.au

Originally published as The Pale King Returns
www.news.com.au/entertainment/music