Music
Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express
Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Chuck Prophet makes a public health announcement before his departing song, You Did. Anyone who has a heart condition, anyone of a nervous disposition should leave now as the San Franciscan is about to lay something so heavy on the audience that it might prove fatal.
Readers familiar with You Did will know what's coming: "Who put the bomp in the bomp shooby dooby bomp?" may not be poetry at Shakespearean sonnets level (and it borrows from Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin) but its call and response with the song's title is the sort of line that's likely still to be with you the morning after a Prophet gig.
With such a talent for hooks - and there were many scattered throughout the set - Prophet really should be a bigger name. You Did is almost throwaway fun, although the audience response would surely impress any marketing manager, and there's more to Prophet than kidding around. He's a serious student of popular music who's absorbed the whole shebang - cars and girls, the Stones and Bowie, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry et al - and fashioned his own strain of superbly crafted, directly communicated, often highly articulate rock.
Comparisons with Bruce Springsteen are not remiss. The current Mission Express has early E Street Band-style tightness, solid groovability and dynamic variety. Prophet's way with melodic and lyrical hooks extends to instantly appealing slide guitar, if not gruff tenor sax, refrains and there's an epic quality to songs like Summertime Thing, which began with Prophet on acoustic and developed into duelling electric guitar heroism. Who put the bomp? Prophet did.
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