BIGGER STRINGS: CHOPPER

Should you ever wish to seduce me, let me give you a tip: whilst food would help, and I am really quite flexible in my tastes there and needs, likewise with the alcohol I would also expect to be plied with, when it comes to the music, one sure fire guarantee is the cello. I adore the warm mellifluous tones of a cello, sweeping emotion into my breast and out through my heart. No great fan of the classics as a whole, it all being a bit too clever for me, a Bach cello concerto can fully stir my loins. and, for a long time, that was the only place you could find this instrument, in orchestras and string quartets.

Things sort of got better in the whatever it was, as Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne revoked the Move and came up with the Electric Light Orchestra. I confess I loved much of the debut, ahead of Wood jumping ship. I then found the band all bit much, sawing away in abandon, substituting schmalz for the searing angst the instrument can evoke, all the songs sounding, ultimately, the same, orchestral gloop. Never mind, nice try, thought I, going back to guitar and keyboard based musics. Folk became my go to as the 1980s beckoned, and I became a subscriber to influential magazine, Folk Roots. (Later FROOTS, and sadly, as of a year or so ago, no longer.) They had a flexidisc on an early edition, a thin bendy 45rpm record, which included a bevy of artists from the nascent Cooking Vinyl record company, including Oysterband and Michelle Shocked. Each appealed enormously.

Moving ahead a little, as I have touched on this band a few times before, as it is but one part of their joyous clatter I wish to concentrate on here. And that is the part of one 'Chopper', or Ray Cooper, as his mother called him, not, by the way, the percussionist, had to play. Oysterband have always had an issue with their rhythm section. Initially drummerless, once they added drums, they have got through a number, the current incumbent being number, I think, five. Bassists have fared slightly better. Chopper was their second, in the band between 1989 and 2013.

Let's retread a little. Prior to joining the Oysters, Chopper had been part of the extraordinary faux-balkan world music collective, 3 Mustaphas 3. Predominately the brainchild of Ben Mandelson and Lu Edmonds, together with a changing cast of additional musicians, they played a bizarre blend of ethnic musical styles, often from the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, treating the concept as part parody, yet tackling the core of the music with all seriousness and with an obvious affection. Sort of if the Bonzo's came from Albania. Chopper, if then under the pseudonym Oussack Mustapha, was their cellist for a while, including on the song above. Perhaps an acquired taste, they were then only on the fringes of my awareness. (Edmonds, who had earlier been in th Damned, is now the extravagantly bearded guitarist in John Lydon's Public Image Ltd.)

So, no surprise, when he was drafted into his new band, he brought his cello with him. I must have seen them a dozen of times during his time with them, increasingly playing more and more cello, rather than the bass he had been employed to play. A wonderful sound, and, I believe, contributory to the increasingly common presence of a cello in rock, folk and, increasingly, even country music. Here, below, are a couple of songs that well display his mellow tones. Unsurprisingly, when he left the band, they, clearly, had to be able to replicate that part of their repertoire, and it actually took two musicians to fill his gap on stage and on records, one on bass and another on cello.

Was that the end of Chopper? Or Ray Cooper as he was increasingly again becoming known, and the answer is a definite no. A resident of Sweden, he has now released four records in his own name, all sturdy singer-songwriter fare of a recognisably rootsy origin, at times not dissimilar to his old band, but encompassing a wider range of influences, often those of his adoptive Scandinavia. Again, a couple of clips, the first to show off his stellar technique on a traditional air, the second a song, the title track, from his latest project. I had been due to see him a month ago, my first projected post lockdown concert. Sadly, it had to be postponed, given the still travelling embargo  between Sweden and the UK. Pity. I have a ticket, instead, for next year.

Mustaphas

Oysters

Cooper