6. Dick CurlessNine Pound Hammer
He has songs like ‘Nine Pound Hammer’ which is a lovely version of the standard. It features things like the percussion player creating train noises on ‘Six Times A Day The Trains Came Down’. It has genius lines like, “Some say the Russian winter took him.” [laughs] And that’s just amazing. Seriously, you’ll want to cry after listening to it though. It’s heart-rending. She goes to the station six times a day to see this man. It’s tear jerking stuff. This microgenre of music was made for truckers to listen to while they were on the road. If you listen to a song like ‘A Tombstone Every Mile’, you realise that it could be a dangerous and lonely business. It’s also a niche type of music, I guess it was only really intended for truck drivers.
