Beard Here Now

Was listening to Band Of Skulls album on the way to work this morning, it’s great, Brit-blues scuzz-rock in that sounds like a White Stripes fretarama one second and Supergrass ADD juggernaut the next. I saw them last week – they played, ahem, a Fly Presents show at Camden Barfly, YEEEAH – and, live, the songs are beefed-up devil-riffs that slightly lack the punch of their recorded counterparts but that doesn’t matter cos the thwack of feedback guitar-stab screeches emanating from the stage impair your ability to think properly anyway. One thought I did manage to process – WAHEY! – whilst watching them, though, related to the prominent facial fuzz of the drummer and singer.

I saw Band Of Skulls late last year at Hoxton Bar & Grill, before they’d released their first single (John Kennedy I-saw-‘em-first moment!), and I’m fairly sure frontman Russell Marsden was shorn of hair on the face at the time. What has happened in the intervening period of album release/critical acclaim/wangling their way onto the new Twilight film soundtrack that he feels the need to cover his face in the hairy stuff? Maybe it’s because I’m one of the lucky few who come up on page 2 of Google images if you type “Rubbish beard” in, but I just don’t understand why, almost automatically, anyone Robert Johnson-nodding riffs in their music feels compelled to cover their face in beard. Why does blues always have to equal beard? Blues-beard should be a new genre section in HMV. Christ knows there’s enough bands to fill it; Archie Bronson Outfit, London’s original Beelzebub-possessed blues trio, and a band who Band Of Skulls clearly owe a debt to, were the same, their frontman regularly sporting a nipple-tickling enormobeard, whilst The Black Keys, a duo who’ve been at the forefront of garage-punk beard-blues for the past decade, might only have one member with a beard, but it’s such a rich, dense, wise face hedge that it covers enough for two.

Of course, the one rule-shattering exception to this blog is a Mr Jack White, a man who single-handedly reinvented delta-blues devilry and introduced the music of the Mississippi to the contemporary mainstream, because he has never had a beard. BUT, and I’m gonna indulge in some blog-assisting speculation here, going on the moustache he sports in The Dead Weather, I guess it’s because he can’t grow a beard, not because he doesn’t want to. He should, he’d probably end up on page 2 of Google images with me. In fact, I’ll re-use that very photo as my blog photo, seeing as this is a rubbish beard special. Yeah, I guess it is a bit rubbish. Bugger.