You can’t fake experience. In a world of cheap thrills and computerised fantasy, Tom Ovans is one of our last connections to the real world. His music is steeped in the traditions of Delta Blues, folk protest and ragged rock’n’roll. Yet his unflinching eye remains focused on the people of today, and their struggle to survive in a culture where morality is bought and sold.

 Like an Old Testament prophet, he spares his audience nothing. His songs scratch at the wounds that society prefers to conceal, at the corruption, the greed, the poverty, and the lives that they leave brutalised in their wake. As he says, “If I depended on good news, I would have stopped doing this a long time ago.”

 For Ovans, songwriting is a necessity, not a hobby. Across a succession of albums, from 1991’s Industrial Days to 2001’s Still In This World, he has chronicled his era in songs which strip away artifice and expose raw nerves. The deeper his knife, the more painful the process of discovery. “I don’t write as much as I used to when I was young,” he admits. “There’s more at stake, the older you get, because you’re running out of time. There’s a heavier responsibility.”

 Even in the darkest of his work, Ovans’ own life is never far from the surface. “Part of me is in every song,” he says. “I’d be a liar if I denied it. 99% of my stuff comes from experience, or at least it starts out there, and then grows in the imagination. You’ll hear someone come out with a great line during a conversation, and it will stick, and maybe years down the line it will trigger a song.”

 His music wasn’t created overnight. He came to New York in the mid-70s, scuffling for quarters on the streets of the Village as the last vestiges of the 60s folk scene decayed around him. There he learned his craft; the ensuing decades added the spice of experience. He survived more than a decade as a spy in the citadel of the country music industry, in a town he prefers to call NashVegas, Tennessee, before finally escaping in 1999 for the more tolerant air of Austin, Texas.

 It was there that he assembled this album, a retrospective that stretches across the years to bring together material from every stage of his life. “I figured I could put together a record of some unreleased songs,” he explains, “and some of the strongest live stuff from down the years, and it would be like a three-dimensional picture of where I’d been and what I’d done. I like the fact that it goes back to 1985, way before I started making records.”

 Throughout many of those years, Ovans has felt estranged from his times, and from a music industry that has long since shed its integrity and purpose. Yet his defiant adherence to his own path has reaped rewards. “I still feel connected to all these songs,” he says. “There’s nothing fashionable about them, nothing forced. Nothing here strikes me as false.” You may need to shade your eyes: welcome to the glare of the real world.

SUN CITY

The most recent composition on the album, ‘Sun City’ revisits the ghost of the Delta Blues. “In a way it’s about Elvis and his decline,” Ovans says. “But it fits a lot of other people besides Elvis, and not just musicians. Lots of people are isolated and lost, searching for the key.” An old Reverend Gary Davis blues tune provides the shadow of salvation, inspiring a mysterious line about the twelve gates of heaven. But the suspicion remains that Ovans’ hero may be too mired in the real world to find anything but a mirage.

ANGELOU

Brooding, intense and as desolate as the landscape which inspired it, ‘Angelou’ reflects the clash between David Koresh’s Branch Davidians and the forces of Texas law and order outside Waco in 1993. “I didn’t know what the song was about when I started writing it,” Ovans remembers. “It wasn’t consciously about what happened in Waco, though that affected me a lot. I ended up writing a fictional account, about the siege and the politics surrounding it.”

 A sparse solo rendition of this song was a highlight of Ovans’ 1995 album, Tales From The Underground. A fuller recording appeared on the subsequent compilation, Nuclear Sky. “We cut two different versions late at night with the band,” he explains, “and we didn’t know what we had. One was more rock, one was more country, but I still didn’t know if I was getting the song over. I knew that if I did it solo, I could get it across, so I went back in the next day and cut it that way – and that’s what ended up on the album. But I like this cut too. I remember that in my head I was imagining something like Neil Young meets ‘Purple Rain’, and that’s the way it came out.”

 WILD WIND BLOWING

This live cut from Douglas Corner in Nashville is wired with unhinged energy. “That was a fantastic band,” Ovans recalls, “and a great venue, cut off from all the Music Row industry bullshit that goes down in Nashville. It’s tough to keep a band together if you’re continually struggling. If they’re searching for another dollar to pay the rent, it can be hard to persuade them to keep digging deep into the songs. But this cut explains why we kept on struggling.”

 Beneath the breakneck blues-boogie is a song that tracks a familiar course in Ovans’ work, from personal angst to political despair. “It’s another case of idealism being corrupted,” he says, “which is a subject I keep coming back to. The song just came out real direct. You don’t need to watch TV or read the papers to know what’s going on in the world. Just listen to what people are saying on the street, and you’ll find out what’s really going down.”

DANCE WITH ME GIRL

This 1999 radio cut from KUT in Austin reunited Ovans and his partner Lou Ann Bardash with guitar-player Larry Chaney, a sometime member of his early 90s band. “We’d just moved down to Austin, and Larry Monroe offered me the chance to play an hour’s live show, which was beamed all over Texas,” Ovans says. “Fortunately Larry Chaney had moved out there a few months before us, so he was around to play.”

 The lyric takes a clear-eyed look at romance, in the knowledge that romance is doomed. “It’s another anti-hero, outlaw kind of tune,” Ovans explains. “And it reflects on the American empire as well. Is it going to swing back, or is it going to keep on getting worse?”

 BRAKEMAN’S BLUES

Another track on the KUT show found Ovans reprising a song he’d recorded on Tales From The Underground, but written much earlier. “It dates back to 1976,” he recalls. “It was inspired by Phil Ochs and Gary Gilmore. It’s a piece of instant journalism, like ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ or something like that.”

 1976 was the year Phil Ochs hanged himself – a stark conclusion to the life of one of America’s great protest singers. “He hadn’t really been a musical hero of mine,” Ovans says, “but when I arrived in New York around 1974, I was at Gerde’s Folk City one day and there was Phil – dirty, bloated, this speed-talking guy trying to score drinks off the owner, Mike Porco, or anyone else who was at the bar. I used to see him play sometimes back then, and he was astounding. His voice was shot, since he’d been attacked and suffered a throat injury a couple of years earlier, but he was such an intense performer. Tim Hardin was around back then too, junked out of his mind. So I had no illusions about how a songwriter’s life could turn out. Any that I had were knocked out of me pretty quick.”

 OUT HERE ON THE FARM

“On one level, it’s a song about a kid on a farm,” Ovans says of this 1985 recording, which he began writing in the late 70s under the influence of Randy Newman. “But there are many different kinds of farms. By then I’d seen people in Nashville writing formula songs on Music Row, and that’s definitely one sort of farm. But there’s a human side to the song as well, which is closer to the spirit of Tobacco Road. Whatever the farm is, the system is always bigger and more powerful than the man. You can’t escape from that.”

 HONEY, HONEY, HONEY

Call it acceptance or resignation, this song maybe cuts closer to the heart than Ovans would like: “It’s about the bare bones of getting up every morning to work, and how it wears you down. Suddenly you realise you’re not the up-and-coming generation anymore.” The inference for a working musician who has had to take a succession of day jobs to survive is obvious. Asked if it gets tougher to carry on as each year grinds into the next, Ovans pauses for a moment, then says: “I don’t know. Of course I wish I could work full-time as a musician and not do anything else. But then maybe I wouldn’t be able to write these songs, and that’s something I have to do, I don’t have any choice about it. I do it because I love to do it, there’s no ulterior motive about it.”

 RITA, MEMPHIS & THE BLUES / JAMES DEAN COMING OVER THE HILL

Two of Ovans’ most ominous blues tunes merged into one dark rumble during a memorable gig at the Borderline club in London. “The first time I put those two songs together, it was an accident,” he admits. “But then I found that it was cool to segue from one to the other, as they were both John Lee Hooker-style stomps. They fit well, and every night they sound different.”

 Together they fetch up a lifetime’s worth of outsider imagery, from drug deals to a grim reference to Phil Ochs’ schizophrenic alter ego in his final months, ‘John Train’. And at the end of the road, “Jesus saves, Jesus kills”. “Living in the South for so long,” Ovans says, “you see so many people leading hypocritical lives in the name of Jesus.”

 REPUTATION

The almighty makes an equally enigmatic appearance in this turbulent live shot from late 1991, fired by guitar solos from Larry Chaney which tip the hat to Mike Bloomfield and Jimi Hendrix. “It’s about the power of God and all those forces that represent something bigger than humanity,” Ovans explains. “You can call it Jesus, Mohammed, or whatever you like. It’s the same story.” Why did such a powerful song never make it onto a studio album? “It was great to jam, but we never recorded it because we played it so often, we got sick of it!”

 LITTLE CHILD

“It was the 80s,” Ovans says simply of the landscape which inspired this bleak tale of innocence confronting brutality. “The whole Reagan contra thing was going down in South America. There was a nightmare happening every day in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Now it’s come around again in the Middle East – in fact, it’s all over the world at the moment, if you look for it.” The actual spark for the song was a news photo of a child, “standing alone in a war zone, orphaned by the bloodshed.” This live rendition extends the brooding atmosphere of the Industrial Days studio take.

 THESE DAYS

The central image of this song, of life passing someone by as he waits at the side of the road, isn’t a metaphor but, as Ovans remembers, straight autobiography: “I was stranded once on the highway outside Reno for ten hours, waiting for a ride. The cops would come by every hour to make sure I was still just outside the city limits. I looked up at the back of this road sign, and saw that other people had already carved all these messages up there – ‘I was here for six hours’, and they’d list the date. It was a tough time: the economy was in bad shape, and the working-class people were suffering first, as they always do. It’s gone full circle today.”

 The song was recorded six years before Ovans’ first album, back in 1985, when he was working construction. “I discovered that it wasn’t that expensive to hire an eight-track studio, if you worked quickly, and I always cut my stuff live. So I’d put songs like this onto cassettes, and pass them around. I met a lot of great musicians that way. Then one day I met a distributor who said, ‘Put those songs onto a CD, and I can sell it’. That was the first album.”

 BACK ROAD BLUES

The most recent recording on the album reprises a song from a decade earlier, newly invested with the living spirit of the Delta Blues. “That was a live staple, but I was never really convinced by the studio version on Unreal City,” Ovans explains. “The performance was OK, but there were technical things I didn’t like. So I was pleased to have the chance to get it right this time.”

 The nightmare imagery of the song wouldn’t be out of place in the work of Robert Johnson, but as Ovans reveals, the inspiration was more specific: “I travelled around a lot in the 70s, living in flophouses, and I ran across a lot of Vietnam veterans. After a while it was easy to think myself into their heads, and imagine heading out to the memorial wall in Washington.” He catches the inescapable anguish of the vets in one devastating line: “I’m dying with the living and I’m living with the dead”.

NEW YORK CITY

In the 60s, New York was the mecca of every folksinger, but by the time that Tom Ovans arrived there in 1974, the circus had left town. “I came in with a rucksack and a guitar,” he remembers. “I lived in an abandoned apartment for a few months, and then in various flophouses, playing on the street to stay alive. I was down on MacDougal Street in the Village for a while, and my apartment had the reverse number to Dylan’s – maybe his was 94 and mine 49, or something like that. But the two places didn’t exactly have much in common.

 “I was there for the last gasp of the old romantic ideal of Greenwich Village. I used to hang out at CBGBs and shoot pool, and you could see the future coming, as all these bands were starting out – Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones. But the old places were dying. Gerde’s Folk City was on its last legs, the Gaslight and the Café Wha? too. Nobody was making it out of the Village anymore. It was tough to get gigs. Maybe there was an occasional writer’s night, but otherwise it was the street, living in the wind, soaking stuff up and writing songs.”

 KILLING ME

Like the other Borderline cut on this album, ‘Killing Me’ proves that losing a band doesn’t mean sacrificing intensity. “I started going over to Europe in 1993,” Ovans says, “and it was too expensive to take a band, so I went back to playing solo again. In a way, I felt a real sense of freedom. It gave me the chance to strip the songs back to what was essential. With a band, you can sometimes start thinking about how to arrange the songs in a way which is going to keep them happy, by giving them solos or whatever, and the song starts to become secondary. Also, the bands I had were so great that people tended to overlook the songs. When I play acoustic, everyone can hear that the song is what’s most important.”

 Ovans’ acoustic performances also allow him to expose the blues heritage which runs through his music like an artery. “I see guys like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as protest singers,” he says, “talking in a kind of coded language. I discovered that I could speak that language after I moved to the South. Every place has its own unique rhythm, and after a while you soak it up, and eventually it comes out of you.”

Lou Ann Bardash makes a telling contribution to many of Ovans’ songs, but none more dramatic than the ghostly blues holler which haunts ‘Killing Me’. “It’s like the soul of the song,” Ovans agrees, “coming out of the background into the spotlight. It’s real effective.”

 RIVER GIRL

After the paranoia, righteous anger and despair which trail much of this album, ‘River Girl’ offers a final moment of hope and transcendence. It was included with a verse mysteriously omitted on Ovans’ second album, but this earlier recording features the whole song.

 “I’ve always been fascinated by rivers,” he says, “ever since I read Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi. I’ve crossed a lot of rivers in all the years I’ve been travelling around. This song just popped out as a gift from nowhere. It sounded as if it should already have been written, but it hadn’t, and I was happy to accept it.”

 (The Fabulous)  Peter Doggett, UK