Crooked Heart of Mine: Giles Robson & The Dirty Aces

Sooner or later if you spend long enough scuffling around with the wrong type of people in the wrong type of places you’ll run into the right type of soundtrack for your so-called life.

I first ran into the Dirty Aces on a hungover Sunday afternoon just as I was leaving a beach-side establishment with one glamorous party-girl who as usual was in a hurry to go somewhere, anywhere – I knew not where – but I was following, asking no questions like the lovesick puppy I can be when I encounter those girls who have a certain fatal mix of extreme beauty crossed with a predilection for a fun kind of trouble. The band, the Dirty Aces, were blaring out distorted loud blues rock, the sun was setting, I was going – following – but the band stuck in my mind like that violet plaster on my party-girl’s bruised knee.

I told her: “damn, that band sounds good”. She smirked at me, angelic – “oh yeah” she said, “the bass player looks kind of familiar. In fact I think he sells me my vodka at the wholesaler. Must be his day-job huh?” We jumped into her car and that was that.

Yeah so anyway roll on a couple of months and my romance with the party-girl had burnt out in a sudden fizz of angst on her part about me being laid out in bed feeling rundown – I couldn’t keep up and was socially disorganised – but once out of bed and scuffling around town feeling dejected, sans party-girl, occasionally I saw the Dirty Aces’ singer and harp player Giles Robson around the same places, him without his band or harmonica, probably both of us getting drunk without props or a safety net. Eventually I hooked-up with another girl who really was a wild type of beautiful female savage though you wouldn’t have guessed it because she kept it hidden deep-down for special kinds of occasions and events, one of which turned out to be an unusual kind of underground party I took her to naively thinking she may find it “a bit much”. Ug, hedonism.

And at this party lo and behold the Dirty Aces tore it up as raucously as you can imagine and my then–girlfriend got carried away in the excitement like a whirling dervish of idiocy flashing Brigitte Bardot blonde hair and it all ended up in a wired and tangled mess of girlfriend hissy-fits and indignation, Robson unwittingly nearly stealing my girlfriend – she must have been understandably drawn to rock&roll – and it was, shall we say, a full-on night. A few months later the girl-vamp spontaneously combusted into a cloud of vaper – she could hardly cope with her own sexuality, let alone expect me to – and for a while I heard not of Giles Robson nor the Dirty Aces. From time to time I remembered the party, the soundtrack, that girl.

So time rolled on and I had to wonder whether the band was as good as I remembered and the girl was as bad as I believed, whether the band stood out for me just because it was just one of those significant nights, whether I had mistaken greatness for something else, and whether the Dirty Aces would just be a local phenomenon and the wider world would ever hear of them. Back to 2011 and Giles Robson and the Dirty Aces have re-appeared with a dose of recorded music to help you imagine you were at that super-charged hormonally-disturbed party with me and my super-sexed-up and slightly-deranged girlfriend. I kid ya not. And I can tell you that if you put this CD onto heavy rotation at home sooner or later you’ll end-up having a party all of your own because Giles Robson & The Dirty Aces have managed one of those rarest of tricks, invented their own musical genre or certainly moved into a new musical space perhaps not previously well known – pure and raw blues party music. How could it be anything else with song title likes “Ain’t Dead Yet”, “Dead Led Evil” and “Crooked Heart of Mine”? This is not music to relax to in your leisure suit but music that’ll make your hair stand on end (that’s my excuse anyway for constant bad hair-days) because it has enough edge to push you all the way over to an unexpected place.

Of course there’s the potential problem around the authenticity of four white Europeans playing what is very much traditionally American blues but listen to this record or catch the Dirty Aces at a gig and you’ll realise this really is irrelevant because these dudes play physical. It’s a relatively pointless exercise to try and intellectualize it because this is the real deal – somehow Robson and his band have ingested some of dirty Chicago into their bloodstream, and it’s demonstrated by the willingness of someone like Mud Morganfield (the youngest son of Muddy Waters) taking the Dirty Aces on the road with him as his backing band. Rather cleverly the Dirty Aces have also incorporated a few obscure references to their hometown (Jersey, in the Channel Islands) on to the record. I won’t even begin to try and explain.

But if you’re the type of person that tends to steer away from blues records because hey, life can be depressing enough without having to hear the laments of the unlucky and broken-hearted then this album will be for you because it’s more voodoo that downtrodden. Yes this is up-beat, up-tempo good-time music. Opener the “The Mighty Incinerator”, which has been described as a “nihilistic junkyard rattle”, sets the tone – whilst the characters are getting hung and slaughtered the music bounces us along willingly towards the electric chair. In fact the music is so good and there’s so much attitude on this record that the lyrics really do seem kind of irrelevant; the Dirty Aces have a street-fighting-man kind of thing going on, so I would probably not recommend that you try to take them on in a bar-brawl.

Now if you’ve got the very easily pre-conceived notion that blues, along with folk and roots music, is specially reserved for men with beards and kagools – a specialist niche interest – this album, if you’re open-minded enough, should help you forget all of that, and anyway let me now tell you, sweetly, that it really is not in anyone’s best interests to buy into that categorisation thing. “Crooked Heart of Mine” should help you get over that idea if that’s what you’re stuck on because it just jumps along effortlessly – this record, just like the dude in “Some Kinda King” has got “a certain raggedy glory/that makes (your) heart sing”. It both lurches and slouches with a definitive modern subterranean groove that you should not miss out on. It’ll make you remember wild times gone and will give ya hope of wild times to come. If that’s what you want, of course.

And oh yeah, Robson shuffles along the street just like you would imagine and has the same taste in party-girls that I do, or did anyway; but those days are a lifetime away and I’m a different person now, the past is a foreign country. Yeah, right.

Check out the Dirty Aces at TheDirtyAces.com