Thea Gilmore
Bush Hall – 03/12/09
Anyone who has ever been to Shepherds Bush’s Bush Hall will know that it’s a pretty weird venue for any artist to play…once you have fought your way passed the crackheads and Jehovah’s witnesses, (both annoying, but at least crackheads don’t knock on your door), that litter the main street leading to the venue, you will find yourself in a music hall of sorts, filled with dangling chandeliers and frayed velvet ropes, obscure rock portraits and the sort of dilapidated furnishings that one might find on the sunken Titanic. Strangely fitting, then, that the tiny stage was taken up with a rag tag group consisting of a stage-shy percussionist, a wannabe rock star acoustic-guitarist, a female fiddle player that resembled an IRA heavy and a front woman blessed with a voice that could both freeze your blood and melt your heart all in the same note.
Thea Gilmore has remained on the fringes of the fringes of the mainstream for quite some time now, loved by those who know her, yet never really achieving the recognition that her songs deserve; this may have been what prompted her to ‘do a Dylan’ and record a festive album in time for the December markets, hoping to get a few more royalty cheques in time to buy her presents. However, before we all shout, “Judas”, it is well worth listening to a few of the tracks on the album, as they are full of melody infused verses leading to sing-a-long choruses, ironically bittersweet lyrical twists and yes, the odd sleigh bell.
With a fair few gigging years under her belt, Gilmore took to the stage with the ease and comfort of a seasoned professional, inviting the audience to join her on the refrain in her jokey protest song, ‘Oh Come On!’, instantly creating the type of comfortable, intimate atmosphere that can often evade performers twice her age. During her engaging and amusing ‘between-songs’ patter, Gilmore described the process of her song writing methods to the audience and warned us that this time of year is sometimes tough for her and that she was going to be avoiding using the c-word, (no, not that one, ‘Christmas’), for as long as she could avoid it; it was clear that she is one of those singers that uses her art as a cathartic outlet for her demons, one that truly means every word that she sings, something that is becoming increasingly rare in modern music. She peppered her set with the new Christmas songs that were interspersed with carefully selected tunes from her extensive back catalogue, including the hauntingly beautiful, ‘Icarus Wind’, in which her guitarist/husband Nigel Stonier dismounted the stage and sat among the audience to play a seductively sparse piano riff, over which Gilmore sang a perfect marriage of lyrics and melody. This led to the hair-raising a cappella hymnal, ‘Sol Invictus’, a song that showcased Gilmore’s phenomenal vocal talent as well as her knowledge of the Ancient Romans and their sun-worshipping practices…now you don’t get that from Florence and her Machine.
It’s a testament to Gilmore’s under appreciated talent, or perhaps modern culture’s waning taste in decent music that Gilmore’s MySpace cover of Dead or Alive’s camp ‘classic’, ‘Dead or Alive’ has over 140,000 hits, whereas the far more impressive, ‘Old Soul’ is languishing at 10,000. This is probably the reason why Gilmore and her merry band are destined to continue playing quirky 200-seater venues, while young up-starts like The XX are selling out the 3,000 capacity o2 Empire just five minutes down the road, when they have only one album made up of two chords and are barely past the age of problem skin. However, when musical judgement day is upon us and the songbooks are thrown open for holy evaluation, God will surely separate the righteous and pure from the evil and sinful…until then, catch Gilmore next week headlining Biddulph Town Hall, North Staffordshire.
David Harfield
(http://www.roomthirteen.com/live_reviews/6273/Thea_Gilmore_Thea_Gilmore_Win.html)
