Just Joans - Buckfast Bottles in the Rain

  by Spencer Robertshaw

published: 3 / 5 / 2012

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Article

If you mixed together Billy Bragg, the La’s and the Proclaimers with a lot of cheek, you would have the Just Joans. They tell a story with each song on this album and in a good, rounded way without any hidden meanings. 'Buckfast Bottles in the Rain' is a concept album about the loss of youth with all its drawbacks and bonuses, and is about a young lad leaving school and then going on to university. The bulk of it was released about five years ago under the name of 'Last Tango in Motherwell', but it now has been reworked slightly and reissued under its new name in a vinyl only edition. I can hear in each song a part of my youth and the cruel fun that goes alongside our teenage years. The Just Joans certainly have a sense of humour, the second track, 'Please Don't Talk To Me', even using the 'Steptoe and Son' theme. 'Five Beer Bottles' is especially blackly funny and tragi-comic, showing the desperate and stupid things we do in our youth. In it our protagonist has not pulled at the end of the night, so desperately grabs whatever girl he can because he didn’t want to go home empty handed and also so that he can have something to boast about to his mates. At the end of the song he feels horrible, hungover and even gets the girl's name wrong as she leaves. 'Buckfast Bottles in the Rain' is in many ways the equivalent of audio film – if you close your eyes and listen to the lyrics, they are just great to roll with for forty five minutes. I did so much in my own youth that the Just Joans comment on that is scary, but then maybe most of us go through the same or similar things if we follow the normal flow of life. They cheekily take other band's hooks and turn them upside down, in the process showing the rich comedy that can be found in life if you look at it from a fairly straight shooting stance. They are attracting a strong following through the festivals and starting to build a mainstream fanbase. They deserve it for their honesty and for writing about stuff which we perhaps don’t want to really talk about after we have done it. Hopefully our youth was able to pay his student loan off at the end of his university years, but that is another story or even another song maybe for on the next album. The Just Joans are clever, witty and funny, and 'Buckfast Bottles in the Rain' is well worth listening to.

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