SEX IN THE BLUES RING Told by The King Bee, the lustful bumble bee that is addicted to sex & blues

Woody Allen was once asked if he thought sex was dirty. He answered with tragic seriousness: ‘only when it is done properly’. The King Bee has always applied this formula to his visits to the Queen Bee, as well as taking a CD of energetic blues or melting soul with him to the hive, to pass the final test.

‘Los reyes del K.O.’ recorded by Marcos Coll and Adrián Costa, produced by Naco Goñi and published by the blues label Soraluce, has passed all the intimate quality controls. The King Bee was first presented with these CDs a few months ago. He listened to them over and over again, without knowing or caring who the musicians were. Those songs accompanied him for several weeks while he was in Barbanza in Galicia making summer honey. He listened to a voice singing a lustful boogie track, ‘I was born in (the nearby land of) Santiago in 1979’. The King Bee satisfied himself in bare catharsis listening to duels between the harmonica and the guitar, which quenched the thirst of vice. And the voice of the singer, with its young maturity and a certain tone of unnerving fragility that is characteristic of the best blues. Anyone who knows Mose Allison, will understand what we mean.

Later, we found out who this duo of Galician stone from Santiago were, and that, like the Afro-Americans who went from Delta to Chicago, they had arrived in Madrid in 1999, where they became members of the Tonky Blues Band and worked side by side with figures such as Mick Taylor and Buddy Miles, among others.

‘Born in Santiago’, we later discovered, is a piece adapted from a blues track by Nick Gravenites, a guitar player, singer and composer who reached the pinnacle of his career with Buddy Miles and Michael Bloomfield in The Electric Flag. The King Bee also remembers a soul blues piece by Bloomfield himself, which is sung here by Adrián Costa with slow calmness; Eros and Thanatos walk hand in hand in ‘Dead in my family’, which should really be ‘Death in my family’. The instinctive turning of the word death from a noun into an adjective is a good metaphor for the excellent mutation of this dark classic. But the surprises do not end here. Coll and Costa’s ‘Twist and shout’ is unlike anything gone before. The pleasure rises with the deceleration carried out by these two, with the help of Javier Vacas and Antonio Alvarez in the rhythm section. All four are the Los Reyes del K.O. – The Kings of K.O.

And now we come to the central tracks of the album. Here, we find songs of gospel origin: ‘Revelation’, ‘Reno Factory’ and ‘Wade in the water’, three excellent examples of this very physical Afro-American church style, particularly as regards the accelerated guitar and broken voice of Costa in ‘Revelation’.

There are both blues and undulating harmonica playing in the excellent ‘Need my babe’, a song originally by the legendary Walter Horton. The King Bee relived the old ‘Bluebird’ style blues from Chicago, with a few developments that makes them well worth the five minutes required to listen to ‘Blue Shadow’, and also sweated to the medium and more jazz-like register of ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’.

At the beginning and end of the CD there are four tracks composed by Coll and Costa and their accompanying rhythm section. They are tracks with much boogie and other surprises such as ‘Turkey on the barn’. It is wonderful to hear Costa sing ‘my heart goes boom, boom, boom...’ and we should also acknowledge Ñaco’s nervous harmonica in ‘Cuncas blues special’, the last track on the album. The King Bee is exhausted now after going fifteen rounds, but he is also happy, knackered but happy, because he has just finished these lines while listening to the African blues rhythm of ‘Fucked up’. No matter which track you start at, ‘Los Reyes del K.O.’ is a perfect blues album. And live, they are even better.

The King Bee