By Monk
Mark Vennis may be better known for his place behind a movie camera as a producer of acclaimed movies such as 2017’s Maxine Peake vehicle ‘Funny Cow’. But, he also has strong music credentials, mainly via his work on the Slits documentary ‘Here To Be Heard’ and the Don Letts documentary Rebel Dread. Over the past six years or so he has also found himself in a different place (sic), making his mark as a singer-songwriter of not inconsiderable talent, very much in the mien of fellow English anti-folk exponents such as Billy Bragg and Frank Turner, as this latest short-but-sharp collection once again proves.
I first came across Vennis the musician back in 2018, when his debut album randomly landed on the doormat at URHQ, forcing us to answer the question of whether it was ”A Beautiful Lie Or The Ugly Truth’: the answer was something of a beautiful truth, as Vennis, like all true rock ‘n’ roll poets, forced us to confront the inconsistencies, the irrelevancies and the bitter truths of the world in which we live.
Containing just seven songs delivered in a concise and precise 24 minutes, this latest mini-album continues many of of the lyrical subjects Vennis has addressed on his previous output (and, in some ways, via the movies in which he has been involved), as they discuss and extrapolate escaping the myopic cultural life of Little England, not accepting that “this is as good as it gets”, about the pull of the city, especially if you want to “get ahead”, experiences of growing up in a small town, the hopes and dreams you have when you are a teenager that get tempered by the time you reach adulthood. The songs are about escape, about growing up, about small mindedness, about sometimes losing and then finding your footing, the feeling of always being different and not fitting in and pushing against that “big fish small pond small town” attitude – perennial Vennis themes maybe but all delivered in a tough new wave outer shell that has tenderness underneath.
‘Small Town Vampire’ is grittier and rockier than Vennis’ previous output, veering away from the more reggae influence he exhibited on the likes of ‘Fighting On All Fronts’, but that only helps to accentuate and exacerbate the raw emotion he pours into each and every note and word. At the beginning of this review I compared him to Bragg and Turner, and that is a very relevant comparison, as this ‘Wild Suburban Boy’ is very much from that same disillusioned middle class background and evokes many of the same feelings as those artists. A worthy addition to the canon of English post-folk punk polemics.
- ‘Small Town Vampire’ is released on Friday (26 January).
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