Pete Feenstra chatted to Mike Brookfield for Get Ready to ROCK! Radio in June 2021. First broadcast 27 June 2021.
Golden Rule Records [Release date 09.07.21]
Mike Brookfield’s catchphrase is: “keep it burnin”. And he certainly does that on ‘Hey Kiddo!, his first studio release for 4 years.
It’s an instrumental album based on the surf music era before The Beatles led the British Invasion of the States.
And while his own surf heroes such as Los Straitjackets are closer to the 90’s revival era than the late 50’s origins of the genre, the whole overarching musical style is still beholden to both Dick Dale, the original surf twang king who straddled both eras, and the Tarantino movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ which gave the music a new audience.
From the album title onwards – ‘Hey Kiddo!’ being the way you address someone younger than yourself – to the album’s colourful Cadillac art work and the surf relate song titles, the object of the exercise is to rejuvenate rather than recycle a musical era and genre.
Brookfield succinctly maps out his own mission statement as working to: “A Buddy Holly ethic’, in that they should be short, catchy & played with youthful energy.”
He achieves this with well structured instrumentals full of stylistic diversity, rhythmic variation, a significant melodic pull and colourful tones.
A stripped down combination of guitar and Peter Eades on rhythm parts means the emphasis is always on a strong melody and a clean guitar sound to bolster repeated themes.
Brookfield cleverly dips in and out of surf’s musical antecedents. He has the musical integrity, melodic vision and an exhilarating windswept playing style to convince you that he is as authentic as the sand in between your toes.
He opens with a Dick Dale lick on ‘Wave Shaped Moon’ as if paying homage to the king of Surf guitar, but doffs his hat to plenty of others too, including from The Shadows and The Ventures on ‘Aqua Cat’. And it’s the sparse garage-rock style of his arrangements that gives the album its vibrancy.
The brief title track for example, is built on a fast moving jaunty rhythm as Eades’s skittering percussive touch enables Brookfield to weave his lines with gusto.
The rhythmic subtlety also gives the big twang motif of ‘Shoot A Curl’ a notable lift. It’s the sort of song that has a familiar theme that you can’t quite pin down, but draws you further into Brookfield’s sepia tinged oeuvre.
He has obviously thought long and hard about how to keep a guitar led instrumental album interesting, for once you get beyond the historic influences of say Duane Eddy, Link Ray, The Ventures, The Shadows and even Lonnie Mack, it still leaves you with the task of finding your own signature style.
He does so with a notable change of pace on tracks like ‘Diamond Beach’, on which he again evokes the Shads over a subtle shuffle rhythm accompaniment
The latter is the perfect foil for a guitar tone that evokes the sparkle in the title, while the drum part could be construed as the rolling waves, giving us the sonic imagery of a ‘Diamond Beach’. Hey Kiddo, gotcha!
You can join the dots between The Safaris and the Shadows on the excellent ‘Aqua Cat’ with it’s hypnotic melody, shimmering whammy, jangly notes and a middle 8 that apparently crosses over ‘Apache’ with a Spaghetti Western theme, in a melodic triumph on which his defining goes off script to evoke Knofler’s early Dire Straits.
Unlike many one dimensional garage bands, there’s a coherent flow here, simply because Brookfield consistently searches out new ways to work back to his source material.
But rather than focus on the album as a whole, perhaps the litmus test here is to do the retro thing – unless you consider downloads to be the modern equivalent of 45’s – and imagine trying to pick out the singles. The fact that 10 out of the 12 would immediately make the cut, probably tells you all you need to know about Brookfield’s ability to update an enduing genre with loving care and excitement.
There’s the pulsating descending guitar lines of ‘Lightin’ Tube Snake’, which has an exquisite breakdown, before his guitar lines leap out the speakers like electrified snakes.
And he shifts from real intensity to the more relaxed ‘Rolling In Candy’, on which the guitar and drums are an exemplar of pure synergy; The imposing tremolo which could be Jet Harris in previous world (with a little help from Jimmy Page).
The film noir feel of ‘King Strut’ is better still. It’s topped and tailed by a portentous tone, not unlike the nourish feel of Tom Waits’s ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’, until a sudden tempo change and some contrasting nifty picking.
He then embellishes an enjoyable retro musical journey with intricately woven guitar lines, round sundry melodies and evocative tones.
And if he’s finally in danger of repeating himself on the more pedestrian ‘Rock You Are’, he counters that with ‘Surf Punk’, which in turn juxtaposes a sludgy noirish intro with an explosive guitar burst that combines surf twang with punk energy.
He bookends the album with the reflective sounding ‘Guitar Angel’, which drops down to showcase a perfect balance of clean tone, twang and tremolo in a succinct summary of all that has gone before.
So check your lotion, slip on the shades, turn up the transistor radio and hit the beach. ****
Review by Pete Feenstra
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