It is always a pleasure and a journey of discovery to receive a new Bobby Conn album and even after nearly thirty years of releasing his personal yet immensely memorable missives, this latest, his second for relatively new home Tapete and first since 2020’s Recovery is a real game of two halves and quite the curveball.
Bobby Conn
14 posts
This time (more or less) next week will see the launch of a Freq channel on Repeater Radio. UPDATE: The whole thing will be repeated from noon GMT on Sunday 26 December 2021; see below for times. We’re launching with a of the winter solstice, from 12:00 to 03:00 (GMT). There will be all manner of participants, many offering up live and indirect sessions – where the music […]
Tapete In a world that seems to have gone completely crazy, it feels like the perfect time to welcome back Bobby Conn after too long away. Tapete clearly felt that the world wasn’t the same without him and on his debut album for them, and first since 2012’s Macaroni, he has wrapped himself up with his regular collaborators and boy, do those guys really bring the funk when […]
London 23 June 2013 There is a particularly caustic line in “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s scathing critique of changing musical fashion, that sums up perfectly much of what happened between the mid Nineties and the early Noughties: I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars. After 1994, […]
Fire The hardest working little man in show-business is back. Inventor of the Continuous Ca$h Flow System™, Anti-Christ, appliqué kitten fan, Chicago’s finest Juedo-Christian edutainer, Bobby Conn has, since his first album in 1997, taken more sobriquets for a walk than Tom Cruise has made turgid sequels to Mission Impossible. In a career with ludicrous highlights such as the original video for “Never Get Ahead” (eye-shadowed Bobby in […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CDS A five remix CD of a track from his album The Golden Age presents the man in full Seventies flow with lashings of Disco, Pop and Soul all decked out in fake chest wig, flares that defy measurement and cripplingly fashionable platform soles. The almost falsetto voice is all petulance with the ghosts of Marc Bolan and Michael Jackson jockeying for prominence. There […]
The Garage, London 7 May 2002 There’s been a fair amount of good press come Bobby Conn‘s way since he last visited these shores in February. Appreciative album and live reviews in the national papers. A full page photo (wearing a lurid 80’s shellsuit) and enthusiastic write-up from Ted Kessler in the 4th of May edition of the NME. Badly Drawn Boy Damon Gough‘s description of The Golden […]
Trash @ The End, London 11 February 2002 The End is a fairly bad venue for a live gig. The room where Bobby Conn is playing tonight is wide but not deep enough to hold the capacity crowd who have sweated their way into the bar area to witness Chicago’s favourite Judeo-Christian Edutainer develop his own particlar brand of FM Radio cabaret Art-Rock. Add in the lack of […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CD,LP Welcome to the end of the world. With civilization on the brink of destruction, and all those Biblical prophecies starting to look not quite so funny, the inimitable Bobby Conn bounds back onto the scene, perversely enough eschewing the eschatological apocalypses of Rise Up! and giving us an album of (among many other things), good time sleazy RAWK’n’RAWL!!! Yeah! Coming on like a […]
November 2000 Bobby Conn does his very best to be the model of a post-Modern underground superstar. His two albums to date, Bobby Conn and Rise Up!, have placed him somewhere in a grey area between parody and genuine adulation of crooners, cabaret singers and all-round stars of the spangly stage. This interview took place after his New Orleans gig in November 2000, and as Bobby remarked “I […]
New Orleans 12 November 2000 Again, a third way around the world and this time for Bobby Conn. This is the Shim Sham Club, 615 Toulouse Street. A round of jokes on that one and 19,000 Heart Association convention goers available to egg it on (“Why are the French Navy’s bases on the Mediterranean like their sailor’s trousers? They are both Toulon and Toulouse…”). Other venues imitate this […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CDS,12″ Four songs of love as seen through the Continuous Cash-FlowTM filter of Mr. Bobby Conn, Chicago, hell, the world‘s most curious of crooners and estimable heir to the Seventies legacy of Funk-Soul-Rock singer-songwriter troubadour anti-messiahs. In other words, a star. There are two new songs from Mr. C. himself – “Free Love”, an epic, near-histrionic bass-slapping time-signature mangler and possessor of a typically […]
The Dublin Castle, London 16th October 1998 +Penthouse; Stoke Newington, London 17th October 1998 There can be few experiences as strange or as wonderful as when Bobby Conn and band show up in town in a flurry of wigs, imposture and post-Glam Rock attitude. Truly an eventful, landmark kind of proceeding, where the atmosphere rocks by itself, and the band play on as if they were the only […]
Label: Truckstop/Atavistic Format: CD, LP Coming across like Jesus Christ Superstar on (more) acid, Chicago’s favourite Judeo-Christian Edutainer Bobby Conn is out to save your soul and wallet from resisting temptation. Aided in his Millenialist assault on reason by sundry members of (among others) Brise-Glase, Flying Luttenbachers, Rome and the production efforts of Jim O’Rourke, Conn conjours a straight-faced vision of an alternate universe where Seventies meet Nineties. […]