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Fame, as an ambition, has always contained something slightly mortifying. You want strangers to know your name; then, ideally, you want them to continue knowing it after you have ceased to be around to check. Andy Warhol gave us fifteen minutes. The Black Pepper Band’s Charlie Powling reduces the allocation still further on Fifteen Of Fame, as though celebrity itself were now being rationed. But there is nothing frivolous about this song. Powling wrote it while undergoing Interferon treatment for Hepatitis C, and that knowledge alters the temperature of everything. Mortality here is not an accessory wheeled onto the stage for gravitas. It was in the room already. The lyric begins with the setting sun, regret, memory, sins and those ominously industrious angels of the past. Familiar materials, perhaps, but Powling gives them uncomfortable physicality. This is a man trying to establish what remains when health falters and the future looks less like an entitlement than a negotiation. Which is where James Gravy Brown comes in. Brown’s relationship with Fifteen Of Fame has become part of The Black Pepper Band’s mythology. His guitar work on the original studio recording effectively announced his arrival, while producer Lindsay Masters retaining Brown’s untouched first take tells you something useful: improvement is not always the same thing as addition. On this Darwin Sessions version, Brown sounds magnificently uninterested in behaving himself. The track moves on a sturdy blues-rock chassis, Powling delivering the narrative with plainspoken authority. Around him the band stays muscular without becoming lumbering. Where Powling’s vocal articulates fear, Brown’s guitar supplies agitation: the nervous system answering the mind. The breakdown is particularly effective. Space opens, the song briefly loses its footing, then the refrain returns and its fixation on disappearing unnamed acquires greater weight. There is something pleasingly unfashionable about all this. No digital lacquer, no calculated melancholy, no attempt to convert suffering into inspirational merchandise. The performance belongs to an older tradition in which musicians enter a room and discover whether the material can survive contact with actual human beings. Fifteen Of Fame survives splendidly.
