By Jim Rowland
The eccentric character known as Monty Oxymoron has played keyboards with The Damned since 1996. A retired psychiatric nurse and trained in art psychotherapy, he is also a considerably talented pianist and has a pretty extensive back catalogue to his name. His latest venture is ‘The Piano Plays ‘til Midnight: Monty Oxymoron Plays the Songs of The Damned’, with Monty offering up his own piano interpretations of numerous Damned songs from different eras, with a few extras besides.
The album contains a whopping nineteen tracks, featuring Damned big hitters like ‘Smash It Up’, ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’, ‘Wait For The Blackout’ and ‘History Of the World’ along with other fan favourites such as ‘Disco Man’, ‘Generals’, ‘Shadow of Love’ and ‘Black Is The Night’. In addition there are four original compositions dedicated to each band member.
Relaxing, chilled and skilled, this is seventy-plus minutes purely of Monty tinkling away on the old Joanna unaccompanied, interpreting Damned songs as you’ve certainly never heard them before. Whilst it can be amusing to hear these familiar songs in this radically different context, this is certainly no comedy album.
His skills as a piano player are really impressive here and highlight the fact that these are well written pieces of music in the first place, translating well into this ‘classical’ interpretation.
- ‘The Piano Plays ‘til Midnight: Monty Oxymoron Plays the Songs of The Damned’ will be released tomorrow (Friday 5 September).