Hiding away on Monday nights at Oscar’s on the Corner for some months has been the Riverside Kings, a new band put together by Clay George, well known as a solo performer and out front of the Cambodia Country Band. This Friday the Kings make their weekend debut, and Clay and LengPleng sat down in the new patio space on the ground floor of Oscar’s to chat, and promptly had a parade of police-escorted ambulances pull around the corner and stop outside the fancy restaurant next door – the crowd of ladies who clustered around speculated about a death inside – a situation which was then compounded by a violent collision between an old-fashioned tuktuk and a too-fast moto driver, with some assistance offered by the medics. Eventually we got down to talking about what Clay has been up to since the last LengPleng interview, what the Riverside Kings is all about, and how it differs from the much-loved Cambodia Country Band.
LP: The last LengPleng interview in December 2022 ended with this comment:
That sort of happened, right?
CG: I went to Siem Reap in December, then to Canada in April for a month, and then I came back and I was in Siem Reap until August, and then I went to Vietnam. Danang for a month, with Hoi An a half hour south. So I was able to gig in Hoi An and in Danang, and south of Hoi An, hotels and resorts, boring pay-the-rent stuff. It wasn’t all that exciting, but I did meet a lot of great people, and musicians. It was nice to hang out for a while, some down time. I was there for about eight months. But there’s only so much laying on the beach that you can do before you start to get bored. And I found that I wasn’t really productive at all.
Which was strange, because in Siem Reap I was writing every day, going out maybe once a week, not really gigging much. I had a few gigs in Star Bar – there weren’t any tourists so there wasn’t much hiring going on, and I wasn’t trying that hard. After [the Phnom Penh bar Clay ran] Garage had closed I had a bit of money to coast on. It was nice to be able to just hunker down, write for six months, and come away with a bunch of new songs. Some songs that I now play acoustically, solo, but there were many that were written specifically for a band, with harmonies and full instrumentation.
As soon as I got to Vietnam I stopped writing. Maybe because I got there and it started pouring down rain. You would think if it’s rainy outside what else are you going to do but write? But it wasn’t like that for me. I love the sun. Where I was living in Siem Reap there was a swimming pool right outside my front door. I would be up all night writing and then waking up and floating in the pool with all that stuff in my head. That was a really, really good thing for me. That pool wrote more of those songs than I did.
Now with this new band, most of those songs are being played – the repertoire is almost half original. At the moment every time we add a song I remove a song – in the beginning we didn’t have enough material, so we borrowed material from the CCB but we’re gradually replacing those. And with some of the covers we’re doing them differently, in particular Clay Pigeons by Blaze Foley, it’s a totally different take on that song, a full band version of a solo acoustic song.
LP: And in the same way that the CCB is a band you can enjoy even if you don’t really get into country music, this is a band that is country flavoured, but not full-on country?
CG: Alt.country has been suggested as a label, some sort of southern-ish rock kind of stuff. We’re starting to lean towards some ‘70s Neil Young – he was folky, country, but also worked with Crazy Horse.
Dave, Sal, Greg and Vibol: Riverside Kings
LP: And there’s solo songs, band songs, and a cross-over between the two?
CG: There are songs I do acoustically and I wouldn’t bring to the band, and then there are band songs that I don’t do solo. Seize the Day, for example. A song that works beautifully in the acoustic space and just wouldn’t work with the band. While This Old Town I do in both, and some people prefer one over the other. I recently had someone saying you’ve got to record that one acoustically, I like it way better like that. Then there’s Rock’n’Roll that I wouldn’t play solo, because you need those harmonies and that strength.
Seize the Day I actually wrote in Phnom Penh, but that’s one of the only things that I wrote while I was here, because I was busy with the bar all the time. Before I had the bar I was determined to learn the trumpet, and I was on course – I wanted to be able to gig with it after a year, not belting out fantastic solos, but just being able to incorporate it into a band situation. After six months I got the bar and the trumpet just went in the corner and it hasn’t been touched since. Maybe that’s what I should have been doing in Vietnam, rainy days playing the trumpet, Almost Blue, my Chet Baker phase.
LP: Given that the line-up is practically the same as CCB, which is strictly a covers band, what is the dynamic like working on new songs?
CG: I’m excited to get to the point where we don’t have to really think about each new song too much. I feel like I’ve overloaded the band with originals, but it’s actually really difficult trying to find songs that we want to cover. And also, because it’s a bar – even though the covers that we do play are less well-known, at least they’re maybe somewhat known, or vaguely familiar. It’s especially nice when people come up and say they really liked a song and it’s one of mine. Always great to hear. I like that Rock’n’Roll gets stuck in people’s heads, it’s a catchy melody.
LP: Having laboured away on Monday nights for some months you must be excited to play this material on a Friday.
CG: There’s a lot of people that aren’t able to make it out on a Monday night, so it’ll be nice to play to a Friday night crowd that’s never heard the band or the material. Hopefully they don’t throw tomatoes.
Riverside Kings play at Oscar’s on the Corner this Friday night, and regular Mondays. For Clay George solo, you can find him at residencies at Oasis Sky Bar @ Caravan on Fridays early, Tropico on Saturday nights, and Organic Sky Bar at the Palace Gate Hotel on Sunday evenings, as well as occasional gigs at Craft and The Vine, among others.
