Edinburgh's Country Teasers

The jacket liner for Satan is Real Again, or: "Feeling Good About Bad Thoughts," the 1996 album by Edinburgh's Country Teasers, contains a fairly hideous and funny portrait of frontman Ben Wallers in his trademark fedora, specs and tie, with horns jutting from his forehead. Haloing him is an inscription by the artist, Tony "Le Pen" Blair. It reads "'The One Who Walks Backwards' in his new manifestation come to Earth to menace liberal society with amoral horror and disgusting sermons about confusion and hell on Earth!" So the Evil One returns, walking in darkness still. He would have us believe that if any light shines for him at all, it shines only from his arse. Let's venture now into this queer light, to probe these rank sermons and foul jokes.

Writing like some kind of lo-fi litterateur ("just a Burroughsian routine-ist," he says) Wallers invents a wide range of narrators for his songs. There's the poor pathetic voyeur who sings "Panty Shots," the clean white citizen who gets surgically altered into the very stereotype he fears in "Black Change" and Old Nick's young pupil in the title track to Satan is Real Again. Despite the variation among them, each of these narrators shares a slightly deviant streak, some taste for taboo and a will to epater le bourgeois.

So what does Ben Wallers have in common, if anything, with these bit players he dreams up?

"Hard question," he replies. (I interviewed Wallers via email.) "You call them narrators...in 'Panty Shots' those are all my failings which I'm exposing. 'Black Change' is a straightforward satire at the expense of the white stereotype about the Black Male, and its opposite: i.e. the myth about white males that they misconceive black males as all sexual. Satire for me is a tool to batter those who make the oldest mistake in the book of Empire: CONFORMING TO TYPE. This is what I'm against, principally."

While the Teasers' earliest outings, 1994's Pastoral?not Rustic?World and '96's Satan, spew plenty of rage and misogyny, they are noteworthy more for their wit than for the bitterness of their bile. But then there's one of the more problematic songs, "Women & Children First," from Destroy All Human Life, the third Country Teasers album to be released in the U.S. Fade in on the band as they churn out a basic yet effectively demented instrumental groove. The sound they generate channels the treble-heavy, Fender Reverb tone of old Bakersfield country, recalling the primitive dissonance of the early Fall while it tips its no-go-diggy-dy to John Wayne (not the Duke, but the band from California). After a few bars Wallers steps to the microphone, disguised this time as a sea captain. In the first verse he sneeringly delivers the lines "Women & children first/then the faggots & the niggers/Line 'em up against the wall/and pull your fuckin' triggers." After a few more bars that voice kicks in again, panning over the stereo channels, now left now right, while it assaults the ear with a rain of dark information. "Women & children first," it repeats, "then the jews and the niggers and the faggots/I went to Istanbul/and came back with this t-shirt."

At this point even a seasoned Country Teasers fan surely has to wonder what the hell's going on. Has Wallers turned out to be a kind of garage rock version of Louis- Ferdinand Celine, another right-wing artist who for his first few releases disguised the true nature of his hate in ironic gags? Has he made it obvious, as he spews out that hate (with or without device) that you, the listener, have been duped?

Maybe you're used to Wallers' earlier brand of hijinks (which Webster's defines as "an old Scottish game of forfeits at drinking"). Take the humorously tasteless, self-descriptive "We are the Hitlers of comedy/and everybody else is the Jew," from "It is My Duty." Maybe, with "Women & Children First," Wallers is still joking, just being a punk and taking the form of the one he means to put down.

"Actually," Wallers explains, "I sang it first in 1992 in the London accent of BNP (British National Party), National Front, you know, the skinheads, and there were no cop-outs like the 'People with six fingers' verse. Or maybe there were?I forget. Anyway the choice of 'narrative voice' was dictated by how, not what, I was singing. I was angry, confused, lonely, unhappy, egocentric (still am the latter). The natural language to get this onto paper/into song was NECESSARILY the language of hate. From this starting point flows an interesting angle on the real haters; maybe they're all unhappy too! Something is WRONG with the chemicals in their brains that they keep up with the old Type so glamorously portrayed by characters like Hitler, Maynard (Nick Cave's character in Ghosts?of the Civil Dead which I was watching a lot at the time) and so on, the list is endless. So an angle to read 'Women & Children First' from is that the singer identifies not with those abhorrent (I actually find them humorous; farcical; c.f. Swift's Modest Proposal) slogans, but with the angry confusion behind such a mindset."

Ahab sails onward. The sea captain drones, "And when I sang these words/of my hatred I was purged/Then it came back fifty times worse." As the CD spins, the narrator's misanthropy spreads out to cover all the tribes of man ("painters, poets and singers/people with six fingers"). Like he says, "there's no bias on my hates/I will pick you all off/one by one as you walk/through the gates." Prior to this admission, however, the captain walks out onto his own gangplank to gaze down toward shark-infested waters wherein there is no "moral rule." The captain, far from being horrified, is relieved at the sight and seems to prefer nature's absence of morality.

As despicable as the captain's sermons are, they might not be altogether without purpose. They definitely shatter the liberal code against ever saying anything offensive, and that seems like an inherently healthy thing. Some of Wallers' songs do possess the power to transport the listener beyond the confines of socially acceptable topics and into some other, wide-open territory, into the shark-infested waters of free thought and discourse.

In another tune, "Song of the White Feather Club Secretary," Wallers genuinely attempts "to explain why I sing the way I do." ("But that's very hard," he says, "and my mind wanders.")

"The White Feather Club?a white feather is placed on a Mason's chair when guilty of cowardice, hence the starting point of all WFC members was: 'I'M A COWARD'?was our drinking club in Edinburgh, a haven where Humour was King and 'Politics Are Beneath the Plankton.' The Ironic Mode, Black Humour, Shock Value, the Schoolboy Mode prevailed. You don't let ANYTHING like social, moral or political values cloud the joke. Okay, you wouldn't do those routines in front of a social, ethnic or gender group who would be UPSET by them?why would you? It's CONTEXT SPECIFIC. And the undertext?although we didn't really intend it?of the humour when its language was 'X-ist' [racist, sexist, etc.] is that real 'X-ism' is being satirised, just like Burroughs and Swift. The difference is that we also had to contend with the pitfalls of liberal politics. Lazy thinking... Jumping to conclusions... Thank god it's come out alright now, and I THINK equality/integration has a chance. No, I'm not joking!"

Fine, you say. But does he have to keep saying those words? What gives him the right? Perhaps Wallers doesn't exercise certain rights so much as he takes certain liberties. Maybe a more apt question is, why hasn't someone kicked his witty little arse?

Several months ago, after a show in Austin, I got the chance to ask Country Teasers' drummer Lawrence Worthington if R.L. Burnside, a black bluesman and former labelmate, had any reaction to "Women & Children First" after he and the Teasers played some shows together. According to Worthington, Burnside had no reaction, but his grandson/drummer did. Worthington claimed that "R.L.'s grandson came backstage after our set. And, well, you ever seen him? He's a big guy. He told us 'You think you're a bunch of bad-asses? Using language nobody ought to use. Tell you what, if y'all are cool, then I don't give a shit. But if y'all are assholes, then I'm gonna break your fuckin' legs!'"

Apparently no legs were broken.

A double album by the Country Teasers titled Science Hat, Artistic Cube, Moral Nosebleed, Empire is due out in September on In the Red Records.