Welcome to another story in the ongoing pageantry of the Panther Burns. This time it is set in Leeds but the principal character and plotline remain the same. The American-born musician/performer, film-maker, and photographer Tav Falco may well now be in his 71st year on this earth but he still leads from the front with all the flamboyance, flair, and style of a man half his age.
This year’s Panther Burns’ model – Mario Monterosso on guitar, keyboardist Francesco D’Agnolo, and with Giuseppe Sangirardi and Riccardo Colasante, on their respective bass and drums – is also the line-up that featured on Falco’s 10th studio album, 2015’s Command Performance. Tonight they herald the entrance of the man from Memphis, Tennessee with a faithful blast of Booker T & the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’.
Tav Falco arrives on the stage of the Brudenell Games Room (expanded tonight into a quite exquisite, larger performance space) dressed to kill in black shirt, patterned smoking jacket, pin-stripe pants and a classic pair of spats the great George Raft would have been proud to wear. He looks like an elegant cross between a 1920’s Prohibition-era nightclub owner and Al Pacino in Scarface. His relocation to Paris, France seems to have assisted Falco even more in his quest to defy the ageing process.
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns open up with Ed Cobb’s ‘Breakaway’ (the title song from the 1966 film of the same name and the first track from the new album). It sets in splendid motion a sequence of riotous homages to Memphis, Bangkok, San Quentin and French detective novels that embrace just about every juke joint musical style imaginable.
We get country courtesy of Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have To Go’, albeit reimagined as if Gentleman Jim had lived and then followed a disco trajectory; blues by way of Memphis Minnie’s ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’; and an audacious rockabilly romp through Sandford Clark’s ‘Better Go Home (Throw That Blade Away)’.
The threat of an 11 o’clock curfew leads Falco to ditch ‘The Lady from Shanghai’, preferring instead to stay in the Far East with Alex Chilton’s ‘Bangkok’. It was, after all, the Big Star leader who had helped Falco on his first steps towards legendary cult status when the pair had met in the late ‘70s.
In any event Stuart from the Brudenell relaxes the curfew, advising Tav Falco that he now has another half an hour. Falco doesn’t waste this opportunity driving his band of “low-down, unspeakable tail-draggers” onto new heights with an impassioned ‘Whistle Blower’. And not for the first time tonight we get to see Falco impressing us all with his choreographed Argentine tango dance moves. This man is a surreal class act; catch him while you still can.
Photo credit: Simon Godley
More photos from this show are HERE
