Son of Dave is a Canadian bluesman and writer who has been living in London for more than 10 years. He is also the longest-serving columnist of The Stool Pigeon. This collection of Son of Dave’s columns is part of a series of books being published to celebrate five years of The Stool Pigeon.

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Book and Shake A Bone CD: £13.99

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Foreword By Phil Hebblethwaite, Editor of The Stool Pigeon

“These are tales of travel and adventure, freaks and visionaries, boozing and dope-smoking, fear and danger, and music. Always music. They sing something about the old days before advertising made liars of us all, and they poke the fire and fret, trying to stop nutting out about how long, difficult and fast this life can be. They politely demand you don’t attack innocent people on the street who aren’t part of the plot to sell you garbage and they take advice from a 92-year-old who has the answer to the oldest question around.

I first met Son of Dave in January 2006 when I interviewed him for issue five of The Stool Pigeon. I asked what a 39-year-old bluesman from Winnipeg, Canada was doing living in London and how long he’d been here (eight years by then). He said it was none of my business and refused to say. A few days later, Stool Pigeon art director Mickey Gibbons took photographs of him acting crazed and jumping off a chair in a room above The Griffin pub in Shoreditch. We ran the piece on page three with a quote as the headline: “I’m a one-man love arsenal!” For the next issue, we offered him a column in our ‘Comment & Analysis’ section and told him not to mess its purpose; that the broadsheet structure of The Stool Pigeon was sacred and all columnists must, in a deranged manner or not, write pieces that comment upon and analyse music. I threw back his first two attempts and then, in some fury, he came up with ‘Music magazines are agonisingly boring things to read’. It was exactly what I wanted to read in my music magazine, and I never gave him a brief again.

Son of Dave has been our longest-serving columnist and he’s written some of the best stuff we’ve ever printed. He’d never been published before, but when that gate was opened he took us from England to America, Cuba, China, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Egyptand back again. Sometimes he claims he doesn’t have “any adventures to brag about” and I threaten him with an imaginary replacement. “A young writer, waiting for me to slip up and drop a stitch?” he’ll respond. “Tell him to bugger off. I’ll have something important to say by Tuesday.” Once, near deadline, he was on holiday in Canada: “I’m just waking up here. Making tea on a Coleman stove by a waterfall in British Columbia. FUCK YOUR PAPER! I’ll see what I can do.”

Right before publication of this book, Son of Dave got in touch saying he was ashamed of the profanities in his stories and asked me to print the following: “Please forgive the swearing and remember that there are always a couple of savages down here at the front.” As you’ll gather from his 20 columns (the full collection to date), he likes the idea of a savage and I remember Mark Twain once writing: “We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has.”

March 2010

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