Thomas Truax – Bullingdon Arms, Oxford 26/03/09

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Describing a Thomas Truax gig is a difficult task that sometimes requires some serious ethical thought.

On the one hand they are magical affairs that capture the imagination, and you feel that everyone should know about him. On the other, they are magical affairs that you feel would be ruined if you describe them in too much detail or actually mentioned him at all. Maybe it’s just best for people to stumble across him.

With all that in mind, if you’ve never experienced Truax before, take my word for it – you’ll love it. Regardless what kind of music you like/prefer this is the kind of live experience that is impossible not to enjoy. Find a date, track Truax down and go see him, you won’t be disappointed. If it’ll be your first time you should stop reading now…

Tonight sees Mr Truax on the first date of a UK tour that finds him covering music from the films of David Lynch. It’s a match made in heaven, with the peculiar instruments that Truax creates and uses, there’s probably not another director that’s suitable for such a treatment (with the obvious exception being Tim Burton).

Awaiting Truax, stage right is Mother Superior, a drum machine fashioned from bicycle wheels, spikes, tiny robotic drums, and for some reason, what appears to be a trombone horn. Stage left is the Hornicator, a brass horn with various accessories that can be played as a rudimentary guitar, hit and then sampled for drum patterns, or simply bellowed into as a kind of loud hailer.

There’s no String-a-Ling tonight, but we can make do with the Back-Beater; a Sputnik like contraption that Truax straps to his back, which whirls frantically creating another set of drum patterns.

Finally, standing centre stage is Thomas Truax, looking the part in a white shirt, skinny black tie. He’s got a dobro guitar strapped on and an old fashioned microphone in front of him, with a haze of smoke billowing around him; it’s almost perfect. A particularly nice touch is the light bulb that dangles from an open briefcase full of various instruments. Every time the light catches his face it calls to mind Dean Stockwell’s Ben from Blue Velvet singing ‘In Dreams’.

Later, he’ll play ‘I Put a Spell On You’ (from Lost Highway) which seems pretty relevant as Truax starts the set scrabbling around trying to make everything work before he can begin, it’s as if he’d been cursed.

When he finally gets going he seems distinctly shaken, and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ doesn’t fire in the way it probably should. That said, he still finds time to nonchalantly drop parts of the ‘Pink Panther’ and the ‘Bond Theme’ into it.

It takes him some time to find his feet with ‘Audrey’s Dance’ seeming pretty shakey too, but by the time he gets to ‘Black Tambourine’ and the ‘Twin Peaks Theme Tune’, he’s on fire.

He takes time to spin out a couple of his own tunes ‘Why Do Dogs Bark At The Moon? Part One’ being a particular favourite with the audience, and sparking a series of howls. The answer to why dogs bark at the moon, is presumably because it’s fun.

As the set edges towards a climax, Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ gets the Truax treatment, which is considerably more traditional than you may imagine. For all the contraptions and clever use of sampling and delays, he keeps things pretty true to the originals. The treat with Truax is the magical nature of his instruments, his stories, and his affable nature.

The difference between him and Lynch is menace. There is darkness at the heart of most of what Lynch directs. It’s there in Frank Booth and it is below the surface in the town of Twin Peaks. You get the feeling that there isn’t a bad bone in Thomas Truax’s body, and if there’s one detail missing in the delivery of these songs, it’s the sense of brooding violence. That said, the weird nature of what Truax does is spellbinding, and surely it’s only a matter of time before he finds himself with the Hornicator stuffed on his head in the background of Lynch’s next project. Here’s hoping.

Thomas Truax on MySpace