Young Charlatans - 1978 LP

As a teenage Rowland S. Howard tragic, I remember downloading a handful of Young Charlatans tracks via a mediafire link from a long-since made dormant blog in search of THE version of Shivers I’d read about. Finding it was not the revelation I was seemingly after (the version from the 90s with the Teenage Snuff Film band and the Clinton Walker interview beforehand is the best and strangest version in my mind) and they languished on a hard drive ever since.

Some 15 years later and these tracks and more are finally seeing the official  light of day. In a world that has scraped the bottom of every barrel, it’s shocking that these haven’t been reissued (or even issued yet)! Taped as a demo with Ron Rude in 1978 (and the rest of the LP filled out with some live cuts from the same year), these tracks capture a young Howard and Ollie Olsen (alongside future members of The Saints and Laughing Clowns Janine Hall and Jeffrey Wegener) figuring it out for themselves.

Maybe it’s the rough recording quality, maybe it’s the fact that they’re still teenagers and no-one is born straight into a sound, but you can almost hear Howard starting to grapple with the tone that would define his playing yet not quite there yet. Likewise, you can almost hear hints of the winding and elongated song structures of Olsen’s work with Whirlywirld. Maybe it’s also because a song as melodramatic as Shivers doesn’t feel as important when you’re in your 30s as it did when you were 15. That’s to say, while this collection doesn’t provide a revelation or a need to replace those iconic later albums, it still offers a welcome and interesting insight into a bunch of teenagers who would go on to make some pretty great music!
-Mitch