THE COLD STARES
STR ANGER THAN FICTION
Chris Tapp’s life has had plenty of ups, but the downs were way down there. And while he could have happily done without them, they’ve fuelled the incendiary blues of The Cold Stares.
Words: Polly Glass
ALEX MORGAN/PRESS
St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest continuously occupied city in the USA. A sixteenth century-founded beach town with old brick roads, coquina stone walls and Spanish colonial architecture, it’s long been claimed to be haunted. Paranormal enthusiasts visit for its ghost tours. Some say the first ever Thanksgiving took place here, 50-odd years before the pilgrims broke bread with the Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts, when Spanish colonists feasted on shellfish, alligator, tortoise and wild turkey with members of Florida’s Timucua tribe.
It was here that Chris Tapp – singer/guitarist with The Cold Stares, and a man with a gift for conveying ghosts of the past through music – found inspiration for one of his band’s standout singles to date, the smokewreathed desert blues cocktail In The Night Time.
“When you’re walking on the streets you’re basically walking on a graveyard,” Tapp says in a deep, southern purr, talking via Zoom from his Indiana home, “because there’s so many people buried under the streets. And I had that mentality in my head, so I wrote In The Night Time in a minute or two.”
Tapp lives for this stuff. All his life he has gravitated towards stories – his own and those of others. Stories from his oldest relatives in rural Kentucky. Stories about the great bluesmen of the South. Stories by the likes of William Faulkner and Edgar Allan Poe, the influence and atmosphere of which envelopes his latest album with The Cold Stares, Heavy Shoes.