It’s a privilege to be asked by a band you know really well to have a listen to their album before it’s released, I guess I should hold my hands up around now and confess that I’ve been an avid fan of 3 Daft Monkeys since the turn of the century. I’m sure I was at a festival somewhere many years ago listening to them as the sun set, I started to feel I was spiralling down into the warm embrace of the earth. And that’s where I got the name for this site from. Or maybe it was the ‘shrooms… But I like it as an origin story even if I’ve made it up.
Actually it can also be a curse, what if it’s not any good? What if they’ve sold out or lost their mojo? So it wasn’t without trepidation that I pressed play. What a treat though, Information Camouflage is everything I could want from a 3DM album. They haven’t lost the spark, that little flame that has lit up everything they do, just listen to Wonderful the first track on their first album, it’s an optimistic, life-affirming whirligig of earthy goodness. Then crank up Energy and New Tomorrow from Information Camouflage and you are right back on that whirligig ride.
That’s not to say they sound the same, a lifetime of gigging around the UK and Europe has opened them up to other rhythms that dovetail with their world. Their songwriting covers the arcane and the mundane, always catching just enough of what’s going on around us to be topical yet always plugged into the wider cosmos to be timeless. Musically they are on a high, Athene’s violin takes you on a kaleidoscopic tour of Eastern and Western vibes that sit just right with Tim’s 12 string mastery. Then it’s the rhythm section, Rich has a style all of his own on the drums using his hands rather than sticks and Jamie on bass keeps it all tight with, well, his insanely tight trousers by the looks of it.
The first lines of the title track ask ‘What is real / what is not / and who is playing the game?’ Something we ask ourselves every day in our commodified and content driven world, from fake news through influencers and on to disingenuous politicians. We have to navigate a world that is more bonkers by the day, a climate burning down around us and staggering levels of fakery. What a sweet oasis 3DM are in all of that, confirmation and comfort that there are others whose feet are firmly planted on Mother Earth and are managing to keep their heads amidst all the chaos.
I was reading a piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian the other day, he was critiquing the moral and emotional void that the super rich find themselves in, but as I’d been mainlining this album a sentence just leapt out at me as defining so well what the Monkeys have been doing for the last three decades:
“We should seek a wealth of community, of knowledge, of wonder, of life, of love: a wealth that does not impoverish others.”
3 Daft Monkeys have been busy doing this for years through their gigs and festival sets, every one a rapturous celebration of a shared wealth of love between the band and their fans. They must be channeling some weird Celtic energy from deep within the rocky heart of Cornwall to keep up this level of commitment and joie de vivre. Indeed, there’s a reason they keep being labelled as ‘festival favourites’; they soundtrack the group connection that forms when you’re out of the daily grind, dancing with like-minded loons that know there is something magical to be discovered if we just tune in properly.
It is harder than ever to keep going as a musician or band, costs keep going up and don’t start me on the problems of the festival scene. So to keep at it like 3DM do is a huge achievement in it’s own right, Information Camouflage has been made possible by a crowdfunder campaign, those funders should be very proud of what they have enabled.
Oh, and there is a really good shanty at the end!
Iain Hazlewood
