About the Occasion: These are extracts from the Marilyn Joy and David Cronenberg's Wife music gig at the Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen's Club on Friday 8th September 2023. Due to a sound issue early in the session we were unable to record all of it but if anyone has footage of the items we missed please email david@forestradio.co.uk and we will find a way to add it to the programme.
About the Performers: David Cronenberg’s Wife describe themselves as a ghastly crew. They’ve been around for years yet remain on the fringes. The ship moves on. After releasing their debut in 2008, twelve years on they release their fourth full-length album, The Ship (Necrologies). Along with other South London-based artists, the band’s anti-folk sound helped shape the South London scene, without which bands such as Fat White Family, Goat Girl, Peeping Drexels and countless others would not have the same platform to perform that they now have today.
The album opens up with a psychobilly guitar lick that rings through the rest of the song titled Suli’s House. The song talks about going round to a house in which the hospitable host is cooking heroin on a spoon. Our narrator tells us this not for him. He much prefers the natural world. ‘”Hello. We are David Cronenberg’s Wife”, he proudly pronounces. This is then followed by the song No Man’s Land, in which the line “my friends are dying off” can be heard. The album seems very self-aware. The South London scene is a scene in which hard drug abuse and loss of life seem to be prevalent. However, David Cronenberg’s Wife is still around, their Ship is still sailing.
A necrology is an obituary, and this album has been dedicated to numerous notable people, close to the band, that have passed away. Geir Skiftun, Felix Wells, Gary Rice, Nick Boardman and Jack Medley all get a mention on the CD liner notes.
What with constant reference to death and a variety of other bohemian habits, this would seem to imply the album is a concept album. However, the main man Tom Mayne said in an interview with La Staunton on her Reprezent radio show, that this is purely subconscious. And elsewhere on the album, we hear about Kazakhstani politics and the Ukrainian Mafia.
David Cronenberg’s Wife can be found on Facebook and on Twitter (if you can get it to work).
All words by Rhys Delany. He can be found on Twitter at @Rhys_Del (again if you can get it to work), and more of his writing can be found at his author’s archive.
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Marilyn Joy: is a prolific London-based artist/singer-songwriter. She plays keyboard and sings sometimes melody-driven soul-searching confessionals, and sometimes experimental outsider songs.
Find out more by visiting her Bandcamp page or her Facebook page. Listen to more of her music on her YouTube channel. Also (at time of writing) a single experimental video on Reverbnation.