Blind Frog Ernie - Inner Sanctum By Bernie Laverick

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Like skiffle, boogie and ragtime, the concept album seems almost like an ancient relic from a long gone era. But who could forget Rick Wakeman's epic The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table or even, The Six Wives of Henry Vlll? Riveting stuff! Even then, it was seen as self-indulgent pap, and quite rightly too. The problem with most concept albums, as the above shows, is the very credibility of the concept itself.

I mean...King Arthur? Henry Vlll? Is that all Rick had to say about the social breakdown of the decaying 1970's? When hordes of young working class punks were spitting and chanting Anarchy in the UK, our Rick was blithely composing futile ditties about royalist tarts from the fifteen hundreds!

Even Tommy - that Mount Everest of concept albums - doesn't say a jot about anything remotely important or relevant other than the basics of its threadbare premise, littered with sub-mediocre songs. Risibly, it was even referred to as a Rock Opera. How pretentious is that? I say all this to establish, unequivocally, my clear distaste for the very idea of concept albums.

They conjure up visions of pot-bellied middle-aged men wrapped up in their own self-fuelled orgy of egotism and pumped-up sense of importance.

Well so I thought. Then I recently heard a CD called Inner Sanctum and now I really don't know what to think. This new offering by local musician, Dave Fox, whilst clearly being a concept album, quite simply breaks almost all of the genre's dated rules. For a start, it actually has a concept! And quite a disturbing one too. Furthermore, it was not written by some washed up old has-been chillin' out, man on an LA beach sipping tequila with a barrel full of money strapped to his back.

Neither did he have access to the best American studios, or top producers and session musicians. Inner Sanctum was written by a guy from Hull and the only heavy weapon he had at his disposal was the cracking idea that inspired it. Dave started his musical life as a drummer. Now a cynic may say that that is a contradiction in terms. Drummers? Oh yeah, those people that hang around with musicians. Quite amusing I suppose - unless you happen to be one. And it was precisely this frustration at not being taken seriously that Dave realised, in order to sell a song idea to his band mates he'd need to learn a proper instrument.

Twelve months and one Jackson guitar later he was fronting his own band, Blind Frog Ernie, and playing all those songs that had previously been trapped inside his head. For the next three years, the band went on to play the northern rock circuit building themselves a healthy following and an even healthier reputation. And it was during this period that Dave's confidence in his song-writing abilities blossomed.

For many years, he had harboured a story that needed telling: now he had the craft and the means to tell it. Imagine, through circumstances beyond your control after two years spent in a drug-induced coma, you end up inside a mental asylum surrounded by the severely disturbed. Tests are carried out and noxious medication administered as the fetid environment gradually bleeds into your soul until, inevitably, you actually do go insane.

Continued ...next page

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