Biography
Kevin Cormack and Jimmy Hogarth first sought to create music as a deliberate counter to the pervasive sway that Deep Purple, Rainbow and Iron Maiden exerted over fellow residents of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The pair—later joined onstage by two members of Joe Strummer’s Mescaleros—assembled short melodic songs from junk, layering guitar and piano with an assortment of discarded items that included coat-hangers, bicycle horns and a bin. Located roughly eight miles off the Scottish mainland in the North Sea, Half Cousin cultivates a windswept, ramshackle atmosphere whose gently plucked guitars, wheezing accordions, dilapidated wind instruments and broken percussion evoke the island’s ancient standing stones and the shipwrecks scattered along its shores. iDJ magazine captured the effect more bluntly as “like a one man band falling up the stairs with a bit of radio interference in the background.” The duo’s work invites parallels with fellow Scots the Beta Band, the Fence Collective and Mull Historical Society, as well as with Tom Waits. On their 2004 debut The Function Room, the semi-spoken narrative “Mrs Pilling,” which recounts a woman’s friendship with a “pig boy,” drew inspiration from Janet Frame’s autobiography An Angel At My Table.