Kevin Coyne
Marjory Razorblade (1973)
Kevin Coyne's mind was a dying seaside town; broken-windowed alehouses, charity shops, battered lives in bleak attics forgotten by everyone but him. His ugly-beautiful mutter bawling his stories like a mongrel locked out in the rain. One-eyed songs on crutches spilling fag ash in their drinks. Demented old ladies, like the knife-tongued Marjory Razorblade, who might just be Gracie Fields's bastard sister; Eastbourne Ladies flashing their knickers; Jackie in his boarding house, paper hat on head, pining for Edna, his love long gone. Lives played out in the shadow of the mental hospital on the hill where Coyne once worked. Max Wall singing the blues. A desolate, desperate, beautiful scrapbook of stories, a scuffed blues bestiary spat out by England's Gogol, the Bard of Derby, Kevin Coyne, dead at 60, coughing his lungs up, missed like mad.
Jeff Young
