Sawdust Caesars!! – A Potential Social Menace Of The First Magnitude – album review

Look up Sawdust Caesars!! on google and you get a load of stuff about sixties mods. Which these aren’t. Sawdust Caesars!! hail from, well, God knows where, they played a lot in Coventry and released a load of stuff over the years. This is what Raving Pop Blast! have released together for possibly the first time. For friendships sake I bought this and found it to be very fine indeed. Read about it below.

I’m fairly sure I saw the Sawdust Caesars!! at least once, possibly a few times at various delinquent nights out in Coventry fuelled on illicit powders and fine thunderbird wine. The trouble with being fairly sure about something like this is that most of it hidden behind a fog of teenage hormones, a haze of brilliant shining light and the romanticism of the over fifties reminiscing.

Here are a couple of things you should know about the Sawdust Caesars!!, they like a geeky muso clip of dialogue. They were lauded by none other than John Peel, and they like you to know that too, hence the first thing you hear on this record is the dulcet tones of the man himself. They released singles, tapes and other stuff but this is the first time it’s all been gathered together into a great big rock’n’roll soup in one place. This means of course that the production is all over the shop – but we don’t care about stuff like that. This is authentic man, it’s what you heard first thing around and to be honest it’s bloody great.

In the main it’s groovy guitar rock. With nods to both the fuzzed out nastiness of the nineties alternative and the loved up madness of the sixties and seventies the Sawdust Caesars!! also take on scrappy rock’n’roll, pub rock harmonica stomping. Punk rock as it was meant to be played, psychedelic stuttering and, this may be the first review I’ve ever written the words, Wah Wah widdling. All chucked at the wall until they stuck in the most groove ridden way possible.

I don’t know where the Caesars!! are now, well, that’s not entirely true, but wherever they are I truly hope they still have their huge collection of scratched 45s and old issues of music papers intact and they might someday make it back into the studio for more of this stuff.

My copy of this came in a silver sleeve, with a seven inch single fanzine and assorted rock’n’roll dreams. Exactly as it should be. Groove on Caesars!!, groove on.

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Sawdust Caesars!! are on Bandcamp. They’re probably elsewhere too but you will need to search man.

All words by Adrian Bloxham