Jon Langford has a lot of favorite Kevin Coyne stories. Like the one about how Elektra boss Jac Holzman called after Jim Morrison died to ask him to be the Doors’ new lead singer and Coyne turned him down, unimpressed by the band and put off by the idea of wearing leather pants. And the one about how Coyne refused an invitation from Richard Branson of Virgin to write lyrics for Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells on the grounds that the music was “total rubbish.”
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The concert will double as a CD-release party for One Day in Chicago (Buried Treasure), an album Coyne recorded here in December 2002 with Langford and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Langford, fellow Mekon Sally Timms (who covered Coyne’s “I’m Just a Man” on her 2004 album In the World of Him), singer-songwriter Chris Connelly, and a few special unbilled guests will perform Coyne’s music and read from his short stories. Some of Coyne’s paintings will be exhibited, and footage from a 2002 German documentary will be screened along with video of Coyne’s last American show, at the Old Town School that same year.
Babble–which, with its lyrics about lovers who go to dangerous extremes for each other, was widely assumed to be a fictionalized portrait of the couple who committed the Moors Murders, a notorious series of child rapes and killings in the mid-60s–was one of Coyne’s last records for Virgin. After leaving the label in 1981 he suffered an alcohol-induced nervous breakdown, went through a divorce, and disappeared from public view. He moved to Nuremberg, Germany, in 1985, where he met his future second wife, Helmi; with her help he sobered up and returned to art and music, as prolific as ever.
Ticket sales for the subsequent Old Town show were anemic, though–Coyne was still off the radar in America. “It didn’t dawn on me, because in my mind he was huge,” says Langford. “I literally begged, bribed, and bullied people to come down and see him, ’cause I didn’t want the place to be empty. We’d only sold like 50 tickets.” Coyne and the Cosmonauts ended up playing for an audience of about 200 musicians, invited guests, and die-hard fans. “Probably the best ever crowd for me in the U.S.,” Coyne would later note on his Web site.
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