Quinze Peites Morts

Anti-fascist skiffle, migrant refugees, love, loss, tales from the road and the back-room bar and what links it all together...

We didn’t set out to make an album about death but it became apparent with each recording session that the influence of the grim reaper was never far away. I think each time you lose someone you care about they leave a little of themselves inside you and those souls undoubtedly pervade my thoughts and my song writing. It’s also I suppose a cathartic experience to release something of that loss and I think good to add to the dialogue of what is obviously a shared and common experience. If the truth be told I haven’t always been great at handling death and certainly after my dad took his life I did that classic male thing of bottling things up – trying my best to keep everyone smiling – until a few years down the line I simply collapsed – a flood of anxiety and darkness overwhelming me as I walked across Birmingham New Street Station.

I have suffered quite a catalogue of loss - friends, band-mates and relations – suicides, road accidents and the big C. I have been in Mexico City on Dia de los Muertos and that approach has always resonated – these souls will live as long as they are remembered and celebrated – these songs and words little icons to their enduring influence and inspiration. From Barcelona to Berlin, from Bordeaux to Brighton I share these hymns, discuss at the bar – toast each other’s ghosts – such is my life and in that I find peace.

So there may be sadness but I hope also folks will find celebration, humour, passion, drinking songs and dancing songs, a smile and a wink.

Los Chicos Muertos is a fluid line up that here includes all my compadres from The Trailer Trash Orchestra (our cowpunk collective) along with several other dear musical cohorts. I am blessed to be surrounded by such talented and sensitive souls. I’m honestly not sure what genre anyone might attach to us though we find ourselves comfortable (though never quite snug) within line ups of folk, country, blues and punk and I’m fairly sure we bring home a little of what we hear on our troubadour travels to infuse along the way. Indeed three of these songs were recorded in Potsdam in the midst of a tour whilst the others were formed in deepest Hertfordshire.

To you and yours, present and past.
Grae J. Wall,
October 2017