Thursday, February 22, 2018

Hugh Marsh: Shaking the Pupmkin (1987)

Untitled
I probably would not have known who Hugh Marsh was, had it not been for his work with Bruce Cockburn. Marsh contributed some violin work to several Cockburn records. Incidentally, Hugh's brother, Fergus Jemison Marsh, also worked with Cockburn, playing the Chapman stick and bass.

This record, has some interesting guest vocalists, including Cockburn himself. Other guests include Dalbello and Robert Palmer. There is even a track with words (read by Robert Palmer) by Josef Škvorecký, whowrote one of my favourite books of all time, The Engineer of Human Souls. Palmer also sings Purple Haze, the Hendrix tune. The audio is on Youtube, but embedding is disabled.

I remember being happy to see Marshs's name in the credits of a couple of Peter Murphy albums in the early 2000s.

Sometime after this album was released, Hugh played a free noon-hour concert at the university I was attending. A classmate and I went over the check it out, but my friend left after a few minutes, complaining about the discordant sounds emanating from the stage. I quite enjoyed it. This friend wrote an essay on imperialism for a Marxist prof using Hobsbawm as a framework. I stuck with Lenin and got a far better grade.

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