Wildgoose chasing rabbits

JODY Wildgoose always was a precocious child.
"I used to fancy Princess Diana when I was four," he admits.
By the time he was 12 he was in his first band, playing bass in Various Vegetables.
He had already given up with school. His reasoning went somewhere along the lines of: "It's full of kids."
Being called Jody wasn't a great help. "People thought it was a girl's name," he says.
"I think my mom really wanted a girl called Judy. So she named me Jody, after the racing driver Jody Schecter."
When he joined Various Vegetables he decided to call himself Little Joe (the band's singer was called just Joe).
The Vegetables were signed to Warp sub-sidiary label Gift (sharing the roster with Pulp) but the band split up when he was 16.
There was a single or two, some uproarious performances in Sheffield and a tour of some of the UK's less salubrious venues.
Jody found himself at a bit of a loose end. "I just mucked around for two or three years, strumming guitars. And then i got access to a four-track tape recorder. It seemed OK what I was doing but then I heard what people like Ween doing on four-track and I realised I could do a lot more. I just went for it."
His newfound zest led to the recording of some of the tracks that made up his debut album, Lovely White Teeth. It's named after a line that appears in the last song on the CD, Wake Me Up.
"I tried to come up with a title but came up with some shit ones. That one stuck with me," says Jody.
"It wasn't ment to be a record. It was just for me and my friends. At the back of my head, I thought it could be released one day.
"In an ideal world it could have been out four or five years ago."
It finally comes out on monday, on the small Sketchbook label, also home to one of America's more eccentric musicians, Daniel Johnson. He and Jody make a fine pair of bedfellows. "I decided it felt right. Me and Daniel Johnson are in the same place."
The album sleeve features Jody's back-yard with his cat - showing a splash of very white teeth - perched, Coronation Street-style, on the yard wall with chimneys in the background and a very small flying saucer passing by.
More than a few comparisons could be made with another Sheffield musician, Baby Bird, whose gestation period was even longer than Jody's. The same sense of musical adventure and experimentation is there, as is the one-man and a four-track machine approach.
Jody, it has to be said, is a much more endearing performer.
He first road-tested some of the songs that appear on the album at the popular Harlequin pub at Shalesmoor (now demolished). He had a relative who was a regular on the local Irish folk scene and Jody tagged along. "It helped me polish up some of the songs."
Ironically, one of the first tracks on the album is Irishman's Cheddar, about, well, Irishmen singing folk music in pubs. "Well, it is a bit cheesy thing to do," says Jody.
Throughout his teens he regularly busked on Chapel Walk, the subways that used to go under Furnival Gate and Arundel Gate and even London.
"I was busking Rolling Stones, Dylan, Velvets, John Martyn, and stuff like that. It was great busking on the tube stations in London. Everyone was a tourist and people didn't get grumpy with me.
"I always found it embarrassing busking. It reminds me of amateur dramatics. 'Hey, look at me, I can do this'."
He didn't always get the response he wanted in Sheffield. "When I was 16, this kid spat a mouthful of Coke at me. And another bloke tried to kick me in the head."
Thankfully his neighbours in Pitsmoor are a bit more tolerant.
"I like to have music blaring out of my house. If I put on some of my music I like to pretend that my neighbours like it," says Jody.
They could be in for some peace as Jody's currently pondering moving away from Pitsmoor after living there all his life. "I like Pitsmoor but I just need a change," he says.
He has some surprise influences. There's the expected Bob Dylan, John Martyn, Gram Parsons, and Ween, of course. But Eminem and the Butthole Surfers?
"I was a fan of the Butthole Surfers when I was about 14. They like to shock. Some of there music sounds like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Their singer Gabby Haynes is great and I would love to work with the band's guitarist Paul Leary.
"Eminem makes my favourite angry music. I find it quite cathartic. I've stuff for shock value and I think he does the same."
Currently his music is hard to pin down, It's awash with echoes of all the best bits of your favourite records and some rock god occasionally rampaging into view.
"There is a style that will become more apparent," says Jody. "I've developed a lot since then. For people to hear my music it should be more accessible. But I think I am going to confuse people as well."
The album opens with the fuzzed-up guitar of Black Widow, sounding not unlike the Seeds or 13th Floor Elevators.
That's followed by Rabbits with it's mumbly vocal that could be John Martyn, but he would be most unlikely to sing the line "Dont go chasin' no rabbits." She's Alright is a drunken love song, while Hello I Love You Jimi Hendrix is Jody's recollections of a dream about the guitarist "with some embellishments."
Jolene is "the story of my life at a time when I thought i was love sick." That does-n't quite answer why he attempts to rhyme Jolene with Jim Beam, Brylcreem and codeine.
Much of it has a lovely woozy, disem-bodied feel to it. Not unlike having a conversation with the man himself.
"I just want to have a good time. I need to get a bit higher up the ladder," he says.
He is no longer precocious (well, he is 26 now), but his music has a timeless quality that is surely going to get him there.
There are another two albums worth of completed songs and "an album of old ideas to be completed". Lovely White Teeth is just the beginning.
jody Wildgoose will be playing at record Collector in Broomhill today at 4.30pm. Article taken from Sheffield Telegraph, Friday, July 30, 2004 http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/