Forgotten Greats of the ‘00s # 2:
Mr. Airplane Man

Mr Airplane Man came from Boston, and were a duo of Margaret Garrett on guitar and vox, and Tara McManus on drums and backing vox. Quite why two women with no obvious links to the aviation industry chose to call themselves ‘Mr Airplane Man’ remains a mystery, but that’s band names for you – sometimes they’re just bloody stupid.

Anyway, I LOVE Mr. Airplane Man, and like literally all things I loved in that recorded-off-the-radio C90 saturated golden age between about 1999 and October 2004, John Peel played matchmaker. I first heard them when Peel played ‘Sun Sinking Low’ off their second album ‘Moanin’, and I’ve been sucker for the dark mysteries of their unique approach to the blues ever since. They even made a cameo appearance in a comic strip I was drawing at the time, cos in my head they were recording the soundtrack.

Thinking vague “records of the 00s” shaped thoughts last month, I reckoned that I’d probably played ‘Moanin’’ as much as I’ve played any other album this decade. It’s just always been there, and always hits the spot. Post-internet, I’ve tracked down most of their other stuff (the self-titled debut, the demos collection “Primitive” and their final album “C’mon DJ”), and in the past year or so I’ve listened to Mr. Airplane Man more than ever.

So what’s so great about them? Well it’s difficult to really get it down in words…

Ok, so they’re bluesy, clearly there’s no denying that – they cover Howlin’ Wolf and Fred McDowell and do trad arr songs and have slide guitar all over the place. But coming to my attention as they did at the grimmer tail-end of the post-White Stripes garage boom, Mr Airplane Man sounded more than anything like the antidote to all the raucous, testosterone-fuelled, obnoxious mess of modern blues-rock.

Mr. Airplane Man’s blues is a more subtle, more intangible beast, a lither, scarier and sexier thing entirely. Sometimes, especially on the earlier tougher stuff, they get so disconnected and hypnotic, so lost in their own cloud of sound, that it almost borders on Charalambides territory, even as they rock it up like beef-eating bastards. And what rocking! At their best, Mr. Airplane Man rock out with the vicious restraint and jackknife repetition of John Lee Hooker, spilling over only occasionally into flat-out emotional tsunami, as Margaret hits her fuzz pedal and howls into the night. It’s a beautiful thing.

Big, warm, woozy guitar tone as thick as your arm, totally radical, restrained playing and churning, destructo riffs – that’s what Margaret Garrett’s all about. McManus’s slow, swinging percussion is sweet and essential too, crashing around the song like the waves of a high tide, as she counts out the gaps between cymbal thwaps and hammers on the tambourine like a reconfigured Motown death march. Mr Airplane Man sound like a gentle wrecking ball, crashing toward you in no particular hurry; even in their more overt garage-‘rawk’ moments, they still let things breath and spark, leaving their more lumpen contemporaries in the shade.

I’m not explaining myself very well here, but hey, thankfully this is the 21st century and I don’t have to anymore. This brief live clip, cruelly cut off at 1:33, helps demonstrate what I mean pretty well:



Not to drag gender into things unnecessarily I hope, but you know that old train of thought that says that the blues, before it was recorded and formalised, was primarily a female form of music, and that when Blind Lemon Jefferson came along, they had to sell him by saying ‘this guy sings it almost as good as a woman’? Well a century later, in a completely different context in which blues-derived rock music finds itself in a generally pretty moribund state, a good listen to Mr. Airplane Man can kinda remind you all about all that stuff.





Mr. Airplane Man seemed to stop doin’ stuff in about ’05 or ’06, but Margaret Garrett has recently resurfaced, playing solo as Magi Airplane Man: http://www.myspace.com/margaret-airplane-man. Fingers crossed for some new records, shows, etc.

Labels: blues, Forgotten greats of the 00s, Mr Airplane Man