Pugwash ahoy!

Those of you from the UK...

...might recall Captain Pugwash. He was a bumbling pirate captain in a BBC children's animation series.  

Somehow, an urban myth arose claiming that there were characters in the series called "Seaman Stains" and "Master Bates", but this was false and eventually creator John Ryan took legal action....

In 1991, the Pugwash cartoonist John Ryan successfully sued the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian newspapers for inaccurately claiming that some Pugwash character names were double entendres. The claim may have originated in student rag mags  from the 1970s.

Amazingly, Captain Pugwash had a very long life - starting out in black and white, as live action cardboard cut outs, in 1957 and continuing into the first couple of years of the next millennium in colour, using traditional animation. In 2017, there were even plans for a live action reboot, but this came to nothing.

But let's drop the "Captain" and say hello to just plain "Pugwash" instead. 

Pugwash was a band that started off in the imagination of Irishman Thomas Walsh. He'd received a substantial compensation award, following a childhood accident, and eventually decided to turn his parents' garden shed into a recording studio - broadly following the example of XTC's Andy Partridge. So, starting in the early 1990s, Walsh adopted the moniker "Pugwash" and started recording demos - dozens and dozens and dozens of them. In 1995, one of these was named "Demo of the Year" by top Irish music magazine Hot Press. By some tortuous route, this attracted the attention of the legendary Kim Fowley, who then recruited Walsh to sing and play guitar for him.

 

Eventually, Walsh formed a band - "Pugwash" - and recorded an album Almond Tea, which gained high praise from Hot Press and set Walsh and his band  mates on an 18 year career that saw a lot of critical success and the establishment of a very loyal fan base, but failed to break the band commercially. The line up of the band changed over the years until Walsh was left as the sole member for the last album, Silverlake.

Over that whole period, people such as Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory of XTC, Jason Falkner of Jellyfish, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Michael Penn, Ben Folds, and Brian Wilson collaborator Nelson Bragg became involved with Walsh and the band in various ways, including production, arrangement, performance and composition.

Jason Falkner and Thomas Walsh

Hell, even Brian Wilson was a fan!

“Back in 2006 Brian Wilson’s manager David Leaf obtained my e-mail through an acquaintance and sent me a mail saying that Brian loved my track ‘It’s Nice to Be Nice’ and as he was coming to Dublin to play in Vicar Street he’d love to meet me. MEET ME!!?? He came, I met Brian, he said ‘Hey! You’re the nice to be nice guy.’ I said, ‘Yes’ and he said, ‘Great song’…..I still think it was all a fantastic dream to be honest”.

But what of the music itself?

It's convenient to describe it as power pop, and it has many of its influences - the Beatles, ELO, XTC, the Kinks, Jellyfish, the Beach Boys, and Honeybus, to name just a few. There's some jangle in there, as well as gorgeous sweeping harmonies and melodies that are so catchy that you'd swear you'd heard them before. It's certainly not soft rock - sometimes the music is quite muscular and it's not afraid to show it. The production is often very punchy, which lends even the gentler songs a certain strength. 

Not that the music is formulaic, either, or too hung up on its obvious influences. There's enough originality in Walsh's songs and the arrangements to ensure that they stand up to scrutiny on their own terms. 

To take one example, the song that Brian Wilson loved, It's Nice to be Nice, is a perfect pop song, with the melody well to the fore, but there's all sorts of extra little touches - the banjo arpeggios, the tick-tack bass, the mellotron swells and the guitar lines that embroider the arrangement but don't detract from its directness. Individually, you've heard all this stuff before, but now it's all together in one place and it works. Lyrically a little gauche, perhaps, but the sentiment suits the upbeat feel of the song.

Apart from Pugwash, Walsh had another band which was with Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy - The Duckworth Lewis-Stern Method - who recorded two albums with cricket-based lyrics. In spite of such a venture appearing rather niche, the albums sold well and Walsh actually made money from it - money which had been in short supply with Pugwash, but which was quickly spent on a coke habit and booze. Fortunately, Walsh got clean and sober after a two week hospitalisation following a major health scare and then a spell in rehab.

Walsh and Hannon

Walsh seems to have adopted a rather low profile of late, with just the very occasional gig, although his Patreon page offers regular pay-per-view live sets.

I wish I could be more optimistic about Walsh's future, but unless power pop has some sort of miraculous and massive flowering of popularity, his music is never going to be anything but a happy memory of the power of a good melody well-presented, but ultimately leading nowhere.

If pushed, I'd have to say that my favourite music of all is a well-played pop song. Pugwash is one of the finest examples of how it's not yet a lost art.

Remember, it's nice to be nice...