The Devil Owes Me Change

Hank Marvin plays the blues like a man trying to collect money from a fire.

Years of back rooms, bad deals and amplifiers held together by dust have reduced his music to its most useful parts: a hard guitar line, a dragging beat, a voice with structural damage and enough space for trouble to sit down. Hank does not modernise the blues. He waits until modern life breaks and then charges it admission.

The Devil Owes Me Change is his finest collection of spiritual invoices. The title suggests Hank once completed a transaction with the Prince of Darkness and remains less concerned by the moral implications than by an incorrect cash balance. That attitude runs through the record. Damnation is accepted. Poor service is not.

The guitars are greasy rather than grand, often little more than a riff being worked until it confesses. Harmonica appears through the smoke. The drums shuffle with one bad knee. Hank’s voice moves between a growl and a piece of furniture being dragged across an upstairs floor.

“White Noise” is the record’s late-night standout, turning radio hiss, distance and absence into a ghost story for people who still keep an empty frequency company. Elsewhere, Hank finds humour in poverty and pride in survival, but never confuses either with hope. These are songs about remaining upright largely to inconvenience the forces trying to bury you.

The album also explains why Hank’s proposed Greasy Blues Hour feels less like a radio programme and more like an uninsured premises. Between songs, you can almost hear him reaching for another record with hands that have recently repaired a carburettor.

MERINGUE! asked whether the Devil had now settled the debt.

Hank counted the coins, spat into a bucket and said, “Still short.”