~ Releases
Motorways Died Young/This is Not Food, This is Not Even Food
Artist: Jocky Venkataraman
Year: 2009
Release: YBI004
You can’t really say that Jocky Venkataraman sounds like anybody else apart from Jocky Venkataraman. Sure, some have made comparisons to Daniel Johnson (who Jocky hadn’t heard until recently) and Malcolm Middleton, but nobody in Scottish music today imbues the kind of idiosyncratic blend of the personal and political with such humour and naive charm quite like Jocky.
A permanent support fixture for Frightened Rabbit when they were coming up, Glasgow’s Jocky took a year’s sabbatical after self-releasing his debut album “My Heart’s in the Humber” in 2006. After a song- writing holiday spent in a tent in the Highlands, he follows it up with this – a Double LP on one disc!
The songs cover a broad range of topics from cycling In Sanquhar (where Jocky’s legs get wet), the horrible, transparent nothingness shopping-mall town of Newton Mearns and the mundane conversations you have with your relatives on graduation day (Graduatitive).
Check out the duet with Adam Stafford of Y’all is Fantasy Island on gay Xmas ballad Mr. Love, the tumbling guitar-double-tracked vocal joy of Can’t Go There and the musings on the success of Glasvegas and what it means to be Glaswegian (the band are big fans of the song, apparently!).
A genius songwriter who has never had the attention he deserves, surrender herein and let Jocky be the light.
