MUSIC

Visceral guitar ace John E Vistic’s about to unleash new album ‘Modern Love’. Julian Owen pins back his lugholes. Pics: Chris Cooper.

Even his speaking voice sounds like the product of an early morning bourbon-gargle. Every which way, Bristol’s most electrifying, can’t-take-your-eyes-off guitar wrangler, John E Vistic is steeped in – and projector of – rock ’n’ roll mythology. Indeed, he’s the only interviewee Rock Desk has met who unashamedly uses the term as a noun. This morning he was watching Julien Temple’s Pistols doc ‘The Filth and the Fury’ and thought anew: “Rock ’n’ roll is the most dirty, amazing, inspiring thing you’ll ever see.”

’Twas pretty much ever thus, from the time a teenage Vistic was growing up in his native Australia and obsessing over the poster of a Rolling Stone pinned to his wall. The only surprise is the subject: “Mick Jagger in a weird space outfit, playing a 1967 Gibson SG.” When Papa Vistic set off on a trip to New York, Junior let drop that “guitars are really cheap in America. He went to a shop in a really heavy part of Harlem, pulled out a piece of paper I’d scrawled the name on, and asked ‘Have you got one of these?’ ‘Well, yessir, we do.’” Within a week it was standing beneath Jagger’s gaze. “I looked at it every day, thought ‘I’ve got to learn how to play that, man...’ It makes you want to rip it up!” Use of present tense is well met, for it’s the guitar he uses to this day. The other key, unfading influences were his guitar teachers, ambling out of bed at one in the afternoon, “blearily asking ‘What time is it?’” and “Walking out of a bedroom stuffed with guitars and girlfriends and fag butts, always amps in the hallway, brake fluid for the old Ford Fairlane outside. When you’re 15 you think ‘I want to be part of that’.” And still today, wide-eyed enthusiasm utterly undimmed, iconoclasm unbowed. “You go through a love/hate thing with rock star people, ’cause you’ve got to be a bit of a prick to do it. But when it’s done right...”

Still, don’t even begin to think you’ve got Vistic pinned. For Vistic is the alter ego of a man who spends his weekdays in London as a Shakespearean academic, will airily wave at the statue in the centre and declare “Edmund Burke is a big hero of mine” and proceed to weave the great man’s philosophy into a full half-hour pondering of music’s potential as a socio-political tool. The distilled version runs thus. “Burke’s great idea was that the way this country holds itself together is its commitment to the past, the great tradition. And without the great tradition there is no future. In 1977 when the Sex Pistols were saying ‘No future’, this country changed. Everything fell apart and now it’s rebuilding itself. If you’re playing rock ’n’ roll music, one part of you wants to tear the world apart and rebuild anew, and yet you can’t – you need the stage, the lighting rig, the audience. How do you balance that? I don’t know. It’s the snake that eats its own tale, the eternal loop.”

More bookishly still, his next project – written with keys whizz bandmate Adam Coombs – is

“called ‘Russian Winter’, based around Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’. It’s electronic-symphonic dubstep, a concept album from start to finish: one day in Bristol, 24 hrs of madness. One guy thinks he’s the Master, and is looking for Margarita all over town. Totally different to Vistic...”

To whom we should return, for the immediate future sees – at last! – the launch of Vistic’s new album ‘Modern Love’, with a maximum rock ’n’ roll gig at The Tunnels: “String quartet, brass section, the whole thing; rock ’n’ roll force, but the power you get from orchestral arrangements.” Support includes the Bristol debut of long-time collaborator Emily Breeze’s new band, and a whole heap of rum courtesy of Sailor Jerry, supplier of same to kindred spirits Jon Spencer and Jim Jones.

The album was recorded straight to tape at Toybox, partly under the supervision of Paul ‘Nick Cave, The Cure’ Corkett, and virtually overdub-free. Throughout, that inimitable playing, the guitar as if forced against a grinder, main riff standing strong but flecks and sparks of electricity flying off all over. Pumped-up stomp ’n’ roll showing you can take the boy out of Australia, but... An album as broadly, unambiguously riff-boogying as AC/DC or Jet, given texture by piano-pummelling Stones-flavoured gumbo and Iggy-ish, cocksurely dismissive vocal.

It is, he says, the most fully articulated recording of a musical philosophy that says: “Sure, you need to practise scales in your bedroom, but there’s nothing to replace sitting with a bassist and a drummer, turning your amp up as loud as it will go.” Consequently, he’s partly deaf in one ear. “I want something visceral. I don’t play really fast stuff and only occasional riffs – it’s more about the feeling of the noise rising up into one perfect note. I just wanna go out and feel something.”

JOHN E VISTIC LAUNCHED ‘MODERN LOVE’ THE TUNNELS, BRISTOL ON THUR 24 MAR. FFI: WWW.VISTIC.CO.UK FOR LIVE REVIEW CLICK HERE

Copyright Julian Owen 2011; pics copyright Chris Cooper, www.shotaway.com

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