from kruger magazine Feb. 08

The ecstatic loneliness of the One Man Band

by Adam Clitheroe

Who would want to be a one-man band? Thomas Truax collapses further into his seat on a crowded train from Newcastle to Sheffield. “I write and play the music. I used to self-record and release. I’m my own roadie. I travel around with two suitcases containing instruments and so on. I sling the guitar on my back and when I’m on the train I just pass out until I get to the next venue.” He sighs and looks at the grey scenery with weary eyes. “It’s insanity, it’s many jobs in one. It’s all come together to conspire to put me in this mad existence.”

Thomas is one of a wave of one-man bands that is on the rise across Europe and the Americas. Their names remain defiantly obscure and curiously enticing. The Venus Fly Trap One-Girl Band. King Automatic. Dead Elvis. Petit Vodo. Bob Log III. It’s something to do with a waning in confidence of the commercial music industry combined with the irrepressibility of people who love to make music: when the bands who seem to be ‘making it’ always sound like the previous best band you ever heard, true musical creativity has a way of oozing through the cracks in orthodoxy. Suddenly someone who can tour incessantly on an income of peanuts, who can fill the smallest slot on a bill in the deepest basement bar, has a chance of blossoming in frugal times. One-man bands, the spotlight is on you.
It’s a vexing question, what exactly constitutes a one-man band. Some are purist. “It’s one man on stage playing all the instruments at the same time,” says Dennis Hopper Choppers. “The edgy thrill is that it could all fuck up at any moment. It’s so much grief, you must enjoy it.” His sound has its roots in the tradition of American delta blues one-man bands who developed rigs to enable them to play rhythm and percussion at the same time as guitar and singing, so touring a ‘band’ became an affordable proposition. On the other hand, one-man bands such as Thomas Truax have vaudeville in the soul. Thomas built his backing band from mechanical junk, including drum machine Sister Spinster from pram wheels and pulleys, and performs with them like a demented magician. Or how about Man From Uranus, who plays a bewildering array of analogue electronics from Moogs to theremins to tape machines and comes on like the spirit of Karlheinz Stockhausen reworking popular children’s TV themes.

Beyond musical dexterity, what one-man bands have in common is their urge to fill a stage with the joys of noise by themselves. “It’s wanting to play gigs on a level with big rock bands… that’s the challenge,” says Honkeyfinger, whose music is centred around a souped-up lap steel guitar and kick drum. “I want to take on guys with Marshall stacks and a big animal on the drum kit.” A degree of technical ingenuity helps in the aural onslaught. The French one-man band Duracell wires his battery of drums to trigger samples on a modular synthesiser with results that are part Lightning Bolt, part Commodore 64. “A one-man band is someone doing too many things,” he says. “History affects what is expected. A few hundred years ago, people didn’t expect one person to be able to play with several voices.”
Watching one-man bands such as Duracell, it’s hard to imagine the music working if it was played by a full band. The crowd surges around Duracell’s drums. It’s like having a front-row view of a crucifixion as he powers through his set, and the audience wills him on as he drives himself beyond the threshold of pain. This intense one-on-one relationship between artiste and audience is central to the one-man band experience. “When you see one person playing alone with multiple instruments, you feel protective,” suggests The Two Tears. “I’ve had a better response since playing alone. At first I thought it was the novelty, but people are more interested and there’s more opportunities.”

A true one-man band has tenacity at the core. A veteran of the Los Angeles girl-punk scene, The Two Tears has spent 16 years slogging it out with the music industry without taking a knockout blow. “There used to be five people in The Two Tears. Now there’s one,” she says. “In 20 years, you’ll find me in the garbage, kicking a bin and playing a broom.” And this is what fascinates me about one-man bands – enough to make a feature film documentary about them, ‘One Man in the Band’ – the question of what motivates them to pursue their music alone against the odds. For The Two Tears, it’s a pragmatic approach. “All the friends I learned to play with have gotten older and can’t leave and tour any more.” So she plays garage rock on her own, unless there is the budget to pay for a backing band. Thomas Truax started building band members when he “couldn’t afford to feed the drummer any more.” One-man-bandship beckoned for Dennis Hopper Choppers when the rigours of touring as a session musician for other bands left too little space for his own music.
For most of the one-man bands I met, creative control ranks high on the agenda. “I like playing my music. In a band, other people wouldn’t play it,” says Ninki V, a medieval flautist turned Casio keyboards-fight-theremin one-woman band. “I would have loved to join a band as a thereminist but most people don’t want a theremin in every song. I do! It’s very bizarre looking serious playing stupid music in front of 200 people… it’s great!” This is one of the most magical thing about one-man bands – the sense that there are no other band members to meddle with your songs or pollute your vision. The results can have a clarity of purpose and, occasionally, sublime eccentricity.
As his train pulls into Sheffield, Thomas retrieves Sister Spinster, the Hornicator, Stringaling and other band members from the luggage rack. He starts to look reinvigorated at the prospect of that evening’s show. “You get quite hooked on the lifestyle, travelling from town to town,” he wryly observes. “People are always happy to see you arrive with your funny instruments and bad attitude.”

Words by Adam Clitheroe

Adam Clitheroe is the director of the film One Man in the Band, which is due out on DVD later in 2008. Check www.myspace.com/onemanintheband for more information, and go to www.onemanintheband.com to watch the high res trailer.