Halfway through Blurt's gig at the Nova, it all came rushing back. New Wave had thrown up a good handful of lunatics whose claim to fame was that their only ambition was to swim against the tide. Remember the bare, dry anguish of Television? The occasionally brilliant and often slipshod fake R&B of James White & The Blacks? And buried somewhere amongst the genre called No Wave was Ted Milton and his ongoing experiment in poetic minimalism called Blurt.
The Nova and Blurt are made for each other. The former is a small, apocalyptic cinema carved out of the bowels of a bank. Blurt are a small, apocalyptic outfit carved out of the bowels of rock and spoken word. You either love the attitude or you hate it - and there are plenty of reasons for either.
Blurt, for those who are too young to remember, started life in the early eighties. While rock was going all glossy and video-driven, Blurt followed the path laid down by punk. Milton's pun-heavy, pointed wordplay was framed by incisive guitar loops, farting sax, unfussy drums and occasional keyboards. Unlike Morphine, with whom they have a lot in common, there is no bass.
But Milton's angry parlando remains the focus of the band, and everything stands back to give it enough room to swagger through the audience. "What is this mission all about?" he demanded as an introduction to the tune of the same name. When pushed, a gentleman in the second row replied, "You should know". The ensuing silence, of course, was proof that he didn't.
Guitarist Steve Eagles' quietly obsessive repitition of what sound like basic rock riffs are held in place by Jake Milton's drums. Herman Martin's keyboards were lost in the mix, hardly surprising as there was no mixing desk.
In a world of posturing, it is very rare to discover a band that does not really give a toss. Blurt bring back memories of all the bands for whom doing was more important than being. Getting up on stage and trying (hopefully trying something that no-one had ever tried before) was more important than being cool/in the papers/cred or whatever drives the current generation of fake-alternative bands.
And that is why Blurt are so important. With no P.A., just one blue spot as a lightshow and a clutch of spiky words they make most of the current scene seem irrelevant.
This review was first published in June 1998 in The Bulletin Brussels' English-language newsweekly
© 1998 Michael Leahy/The Bulletin taken without permission