David Harfield

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Stories about Sex, dalliances with Drugs and two solid hours of Rock and Roll…what more do you want from a live show?!

Posted by davidharfield on January 19, 2011

Islington O2 Academy, Wed 08 Dec 10

 

As a music journalist, you tend to go to a lot of gigs, but it’s only a very select few that you end up sitting on the floor in the middle of the gig with the lead singer lying next to you telling the audience, (also seated), a story of how small his penis shrank to when he first tried ecstasy.

As you can probably already tell, this was a fairly special show; for those of you don’t know Jesse Malin, he is one of the most underrated talents of the New York rock scene, after fronting seminal hardcore band Heart Attack and the glam punk extravaganza that was D-Generation.  After paying his dues in these semi-successful collaborations, Jesse then pursued a solo career that began with the Ryan Adams-produced 2002 debut ‘The Fine Art of Self Destruction’, which saw the songwriter tipping his cap more towards the likes of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, leaving the eyeliner and distortion peddles behind him.

Cut to almost a decade and a handful of albums later and Mr. Malin was faced with the prospect of entertaining a couple of hundred rock fans that had braved the bitter weather to hear him play.  Clocking in at just under two hours of continuous playing, (and bear in mind that few of Jesse’s rock and roll numbers last more than four minutes), we certainly got our money’s worth.  After entering the stage to the strains of orchestral Christmas music, Jesse and his backing band tore through three pop-tinged punk rock numbers taken from his latest album, complete with defiant fist shaking, rock and roll swaggering and triumphant shrieks of exuberance to punctuate the heart-wrenching melodic tales of blue collar loves and losses.

To visualize Jesse on stage, fans of the Mighty Boosh should think Vince Noir performing his definitive Mick Jagger impression, (YouTube it, well worth the click), wielding an acoustic guitar as if it were a weapon.  His showmanship is inimitable, as he regaled the audiences of self-deprecating, genuinely funny stories about life on the road.  One story saw him walk out into the crowd, talking about the occasional mishaps of combining sex and drugs, (see first paragraph)…moral: stick to rock’n’roll.

It wouldn’t be a Christmas show without an encore of ‘Fairytale of New York’, a song that he recorded for his 2008 covers album ‘On Your Sleeve’ and perfectly bookended his set that was packed full of inspiration, desolation and above all hope against any odds…now pass the bottle and get practicing that Jagger strut!

David Harfield

To listen to Jesse Malin, click here.

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No dickheads allowed, Films of Colour rock The Bull and Gate

Posted by davidharfield on September 23, 2010

Films of Colour

The Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, London

20/09/10

Remember when Nathan Barley hit our screens a few years ago?  First thoughts were that the media and fashion scene of Shoreditch would implode in a fireball of self-aware irony and everybody would start wearing proper clothes and get proper jobs…well, it didn’t.  Far from it, the cult TV series managed to throw fuel on to the raging furnace of skinny jeans, tiny phones and even tinier bikes, showing everybody with an N1 postcode how to be, in Dan ‘Preacher’ Ashcroft’s words, ‘an idiot’.  The latest lampoon of East London culture comes from the cultural news website ‘The Poke’ in the form of a catchy song with an accompanying video entitled, ‘I Love My Life As a Dickhead’; anyone who has not seen it, prepare yourself by making a funeral pyre/shopping list for jeggings, retro necklaces and ‘just-the-frame’ glasses, sit back and enjoy/cry.

Anyway, the funniest line in it is when the song’s protagonist offers listeners a +1 to see his band, in which, “I play synth…we all play synth.”  (Trust me, it’s funny, OK?)  Well, after this blatant piss taking of the synth-band format, I was concerned that Films of Colour would cave under the pressure and choose another instrument to create the epic soundscapes that underlie their melodious pop-rock…(“we all play Kazoo?!”)  However, the boys did give into this fear and, flying in the face of cynics, the bassist exchanged his guitar for the keys and triggers provided by his synthesizer and laptop, giving the well crafted tunes a stadium-sized feel.

On stage the band exuded a confident swagger, showcasing a selection of their back catalogue for a crowd made up of other bands artists, journalists and music executives and, fortuitously, not a dickhead in sight.  They saved most of their energy for the final number, ‘Actions’, a glorious, hook-filled foot stomper complete which is to be released as a single over the coming weeks.  Of all the bands on the indie scene in East London, Films of Colour are amongst the cream of the crop, serious musicians who clearly put their heart and soul into what they do; so please buy their new single or they might be forced to sell out and get dickhead jobs in media!

David Harfield

To read the published review, click here.

To listen to Films of Colour, click here.

To watch the video, ‘I Love My Life As a Dickhead’, click here.

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Showing the new generation how it’s done, Thea Gilmore entertains, enchants and enslaves us with her festive cheer.

Posted by davidharfield on December 13, 2009

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)


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Breathy, beautiful and bursting out of the aisles, Ray LaMontagne takes the Royal Albert Hall by gentle storm.

Posted by davidharfield on October 7, 2009

Ray LaMontagne

Royal Albert Hall – Autumn Tour 2009

It’s an ambitious solo artist (or a solo artist’s ambitious management) that books two consecutive dates at such a venerable institute as the Royal Albert Hall, especially when most of that artist’s fan base still don’t really know how to pronounce his name.  In any case, by the time legendary alt. country producer Ethan Johns arrived on stage to entertain Ray LaMontagne’s (pronounced /laːmɒnˈteɪːn/, according to Wikipedia) audience with acoustic styled country love ballads, the Hall was looking disconcertingly bare.

After Johns had dutifully filled his slot with what can only really be described as amenable warm up patter, it was time for Josh Ritter to woo the crowd with his own particular brand of alt. country, (what a manner of sins that genre covers!), yet woo he did.  With the type of closed harmonies usually found in barber shop quartets, Ritter, his guitarist and a truly adventurous double bass player performed a choice selection from his extensive back catalogue, ranging from the soft protest of the Dylanesque ‘Girl In The War’ to the vitriolic barnstorm of ‘Harrisburg’, before closing with ‘Kathleen’, vamped up in true glorious style.

During Ritter’s support act, the rest of the seats had been filled by audience members, either drawn to the country troubadour’s engaging performance or capitulating to the polite but incredibly firm warnings from the overhead speakers, announcing that Ray was soon to take the stage.  When he arrived, complete with a full backing band he could see that his prestigious name, no matter how difficult to enunciate, had managed to fill the house.  Opening with the sparse epic that is ‘Be Here Now’, he moved quickly on to ‘Empty’, which, as fans will know, are the inaugural two tracks on his second album ‘Till The Sun Turns Black’.  Uh oh.  This wasn’t going to be one of those gigs that sounds as if someone has just put the CD on really loud, was it?  Never fear, for as soon as he had cut loose those two beautiful albatrosses from his proverbial neck, La Montagne led his band through a set that at once soared, floated, touched and crushed the audience with emotion, with the music of a seasoned bluesman, lyrics of a heartbroken vagabond and the voice of a dusky angel.

Set highlights were not the ones that were to be expected; sure, hits like ‘Trouble’ and ‘Three More Days’ were delivered with the style and panache that one expects from a performer who has spent the better part of a decade on the road, but it was the ‘album’ tracks that turned out to be the real gems, with ‘Till The Sun Turns Black’ offering the audience a five minute exposure to the type of open heart surgery only available to man and a microphone.  His reputation for not engaging his audience with the standard ‘Anyone here from out of town?’ fare that many musicians feel it necessary to proffer had obviously proceeded him, with screams of, “Talk to us, Ray!” being warbled by the more restless members of the audience.  His own silence was actually the key to quietening these interruptions, allowing his music to speak for him; to the man who began singing ‘Wonderwall’ at the stage, please return whomever’ ticket it was that you stole and never again return to a crowded place, as you are essentially an oxygen thief.

The encore opened with a wonderfully appropriate cover of Dylan’s ‘The Man In Me’, then the desolate ‘Jolene’ ended what had been a beautiful night, a halcyon, Dorian Gray type of song, one that never grows old no matter how many times it is visited.  With LaMontagne’s ability to host nights like this night and continually put out such music of pure, unequivocal emotion, perhaps for his next record even two nights at the Royal Albert Hall won’t be enough.

David Harfield

(http://www.roomthirteen.com/live_reviews/6172/Ray_Lamontagne_at_Ray_LaMontagne_Tour_Autumn_2009.html)


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Live Review

Posted by davidharfield on May 28, 2009

Bob Dylan & His Band

Roundhouse, Camden

26/04/09

“You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy, you may call me anything but no matter what you say, you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”  Not exactly Dylan’s finest lyrical hour, yet strangely apt as the mile long queue to The Roundhouse stood at the mercy of fluorescent security guards who were taking their job as seriously as possible, considering that they are essentially human barriers.  The first in-line had been there since midday and presumably ran straight to the facilities on gaining entry, losing their much-coveted position at the front of the stage to rival Bob-heads.  As Dylan’s performance history is more chequered than a racing flag, to say that the 1800-strong crowd was full of trepidation would be an understatement.  The £50 price tag on the ticket was irrelevant, as Dylan fans would pay double that in the blink of an eye; it was the fact that this was probably the closest the majority of them would ever get to  their iconic hero.  With expectations at an all time high due to the intimacy of the venue, a converted railway turning station with fantastic acoustics, if ever Dylan did feel pressure, it would be tonight; true to form, he arrived with a nonchalant attitude and turned out a performance that should rank among his recent best.

Although it would have been ironically appropriate for him to open with a song from the  evangelical album Slow Train Coming, thankfully Dylan refrained, instead launching into a vamped up version of Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat, which segued neatly into a beautiful and surprisingly melodic, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.  The voice that has brought him such controversy over the years was both strong and clear(ish) and the bar-blues rock of the band did not overpower him, which can often be the case in larger venues.  While his extensive back catalogue could allow an alternate greatest hits set a dozen times over, Dylan decided to serenade his fans with an amenable blend of old and new, famous and obscure.  Set favourites, Like a Rolling Stone and All Along The Watchtower were greeted like old friends, while 2001′s Love and Theft was pillaged for five numbers including a fantastically jaunty Po’ Boy, it’s delicate refrain snarled from lips equally full of self pity and deprecation.

The encore ended with an extended rendition of Blowin’ in the Wind, with Dylan stepping out from behind the proverbial audience-shield that his organ has become of recent years and rocking the house with a trademark harmonica solo, all the while appearing like some crazed southern prospector in his token fedora and white linen suit.  Rumours circulating before the show had posited the performance as a stripped bare acoustic set; it would appear that Dylan fans have come full circle after the embracing of his ‘going electric’ in 1965, yearning once again for his folksy roots.  This was simply another stop on his never-ending tour, yet with Dylan and his band held up to the light by the intimacy of the venue; once again, he proved that it’s not dark yet, and not even getting there.

David Harfield

(http://www.roomthirteen.com/live_reviews/5905/Bob_Dylan_at_Bob_Dylan_Tour_Summer_2009.html)

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Chicago punk poets prove why they’ll be with us to the end…and then some.

Posted by davidharfield on February 20, 2009

Alkaline Trio – Manchester Academy – 11/02/09

It must be hard to support a band like Alkaline Trio.  Whilst having brief flirtations with the mainstream, the Chicago-based punk threesome have never been a ‘popular’ band, yet over their thirteen years together have accrued a modest legion of hardcore fans who would gladly follow them to Hell and back, and can certainly be relied upon to turn up when they visit their hometown.  In any case, the impatient audience seemed less than impressed with the blend of  dance, rock and funk of warm up act The Audition (a name that invites too many jokes to even bother), with a front man who obviously graduated late from the Jay-Z school of showmanship, hollering, “F**k Yeah!” at any given opportunity.  Think Justin Timberlake singing Taking Back Sunday covers, halve it and you’re nearly there…

After a prolonged interval involving a stage-hogging roadie who insisted on tuning each instrument to a Rain Man-like level of detail, (definitely E-flat, definitely…) the main attraction finally arrived, to the strains of a histrionic string section, before singer/guitarist Matt Skiba’s knife-like chords cut into Agony and Irony‘s opener Calling all Skeletons.  Clad in skin-tight black leather and complete with a bare chest, scrawled tattoos and wraparound sunglasses, Skiba looked every inch the archetypal rock star, wearing his heart and attitude on torn sleeves.  Rushing through a few crowd favourites, the band took a while to find their stride, but when they did it was everything that a punk rock show should be.

With a tightness and cohesive flow that can only be achieved through a decade of sharing a stage, twin vocalists Skiba and Dan Andriano exchanged turns in the spotlight, Andriano’s bellowed crooning the perfect counterpart to Skiba’s triumphant rasp.  Both singers supported each other’s songs with harmonies intricate enough to make Brian Wilson Smile, proving that there’s more to their particular brand of punk-rock than rusty three chord patterns.  Career defining anthem Sadie, a song documenting the true story of a member of Charles Manson’s ill-fated cult, united the arena in awed silence.  Anyone bereft of goose bumps following Skiba’s desolate howl, “the blood they found on you/Charlie’s broken .22”, to the backdrop of genuine tape footage from Sadie Glutz’s interrogation cell should have been discharged from the arena immediately, their punk licence in tatters.

Goodbye Forever was dedicated to, “the late, great Jerry Finn,” the much-revered punk-rock producer who passed away last year and who had collaborated with the band several times, giving their more recent albums a radio-friendlier sheen.  It’s a testament to how little they have compromised their sound that such an old favourite segued so neatly into the more recent Emma.  Detractors from their music would argue that too many songs sound too similar; while it is true that many of the songs begin and end with the full band crashing through a set of power chords, these jibes miss the essence of Alkaline Trio.  This band happily bleeds for their audience, no matter who they are and this is the reason why such a strong contingent of their fan base wear their show of allegiance on ink-stained skin.  The ironic lyrical blend of hope and despair, heartache and joy all coated in irreverent wit and spun amongst a melodic maelstrom of sheer punk rock unites fans from all musical avenues in the celebration of pure ragged emotion and anyone who doesn’t get it, well it’s their loss.

This show of unity was epitomised during the encore, in an achingly intimate version of Blue in the Face; Skiba, framed against the darkness by jagged spotlights, scratchily enquired, “I don’t dream since I quit sleeping and I haven’t slept since I met you….so what do you say, your coffin or mine?”    A band that would happily share eternity with its fans is certainly worth spending a lifetime with.

David Harfield

(http://www.roomthirteen.com/live_reviews/5787/Alkaline_Trio_Alkaline_Trio_S.html)

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Still burning up a storm, Scottish indie kids provide nonchalant chaos to a welcoming audience.

Posted by davidharfield on February 16, 2009

The View – Manchester Academy 2 – 09/02/09

It’s just not fair. Guitar music is just too good nowadays. Ever since the Arctic Monkeys arrived and blew away any hope for skinny-jeaned indie kids to avoid the workplace for a few years, the bar has been raised to an unreasonable height. Five years ago support act The Last Gang, who looked like Franz Ferdinand on smack and sounded like Scouting For Girls on speed, would have received a modest record deal and would be headlining the Manchester Academy, instead of filling the support slot and hawking their own EPs after the gig. “3 songs, 3 quid…”

One band that did make the cut in that 2005/6 wave of ‘landfill indie’ were Dundee youngsters The View, with their cheery, Libertines-lite debut, Hats off to the Buskers; now they’re back with a follow-up album, Which Bitch, and a tireless touring schedule has kept the indie-rockers very busy indeed. The band that built their reputation on riotous yet joyous performances seem to have lost none of the enthusiasm that got them noticed in the first place; even before they appeared, their vociferous fan base were chanting, “The View, The View, The View are on fire!” and were having so much fun exchanging beer mid-air that the band’s presence seemed almost superfluous. When they did arrive it was to the strains of tuneful feedback, greeting the crowd with a few, “och ayes?“, before tearing into their high-octane indie numbers, with the same confidence, energy and haircuts that they possessed last time around.

Crowd favourites were cherry-picked from their back catalogue, with the pop-tastic Wasted Little DJs being dropped in early on to great applause; dwarfed behind a trademark electric-acoustic guitar and sporting a shock of curls that would put Frank Zappa to shame, frontman Kyle Falconer led his band of (very) merry men through a loose but practiced set, punctuating the tunes with a kind of melodic rambling, all coated in a thick Dundee accent. Perhaps in the spirit of the ramshackle jam session that was the latter half of their set, Falconer swapped both instruments and roles with bassist Kieran Webster and let him shout his way through a few punked up tunes; while both charming and entertaining, it was also slightly misjudged, as Falconer’s heavy-handed strumming of the bass transformed the venue into what felt like a Pendulum house party. This laissez-faire attitude is one of the most attractive features of The View and is possibly one of the reasons that they were signed so early on in their career. However, the devil-may-care attitude that brought them this far may prove to be an ironic stumbling block that prevents them from being main players in the UK rock scene.

What prevented the show from being great as opposed to just pretty good was that a few too many of the songs sounded too similar as sections of the set seemed to merge into one another. The fact that Falconer’s idiosyncratic vocal technique rendered the lyrics indecipherable to anyone other than the band’s, (albeit fairly prevalent), fan base did not help matters. Recent single Shock Horror was saved for the finale, complete with a mass sing-along, crowd surfing and some 12A-rated disrobing from the otherwise anonymous drummer. The View may not have the mass appeal of the Arctic Monkeys or indeed their prodigious talent, but their infectiously insouciant anthems coupled with the sheer youthful exuberance of their delivery will surely keep them on the main stage for some time to come…and it’s not like they really care anyway.

David Harfield

(http://www.roomthirteen.com/live_reviews/5786/View_at_The_View_Tour_Spring_2009.html)

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MOJO Live: Jolie Holland

Posted by davidharfield on January 15, 2009

 

Ruby Lounge, Manchester

December 2, 2008

Letting your hillbilly country cousin open a show for you is either a benevolent act of charity, or a shrewd ploy to lower audience expectations; either way, after Sam Amidon’s support set that consisted of tuneless, banjo-accompanied sea shanties, each interrupted by nonsensical monologues and culminating with a break-dancing finale, any performance Jolie Holland had churned out would have been greeted with warm enthusiasm by the audience at Ruby Lounge, Manchester. If indeed this was such a ruse, the Texan songstress needn’t have bothered; her Waits-ian, bluesy folk more than excused her peculiar choice of a warm-up act. With a vocal quality evocative of Beth Orton after a round of treacle-laced Jack Daniels, Holland also had that Regina Spektor-ish knack of treating lyrics not as words but as sounds, sounds that she could twist, contort, lengthen or cut off, lending the songs a curiously burlesque trait. Punctuating the end of each song with a curtsied, “Thanks y’all!” added to the intimate atmosphere already generated by the giant lamp offering soft, mood lighting to a stage littered with banjos and fiddles, as if it had been styled on a living room in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains.

Highlights included rabble-raising stomper and recent single, The Living And The Dead and breezy lament Crush In The Ghetto, with Holland sounding at once gracefully effortless and torturously heart strained, a delightful paradox fitting for the tiny girl with a canyon-sized voice, who referenced the Velvet Underground, John Coltrane and Native Americans as influences throughout the show. In keeping with the cosy feel of the gig, Holland chatted with MOJO afterwards, and it was immediately obvious by her sultry, cherubic looks and enchanting Southern drawl why 90% of her audience that night were male; mainly paunchy, middle-aged men looking lustfully on and regretting what could have been, but never was. Would she draw such a crowd if she had the same talent, but looked like Beth Ditto’s fatter sister? Probably not. Does it matter? Definitely not.

David Harfield

(written at MOJO magazine, Dec 2008)

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Steve Stills **///

Posted by davidharfield on January 15, 2009

Manchester Apollo
Monday 13 Oct 2008

With no support acts to warm up the crowd of weekend rockers, the once-legendary second initial of a certain 70’s super group took to the stage with a blustering confidence, wandering about checking amps like some befuddled acid veteran from CSNY’s heyday. Armed only with an acoustic guitar, he made some small talk with the crowd before launching into a stripped bare set of his classics with interludes peppered with knowing jokes that only he really understood. To his credit, he raised his averagely crafted songs above the mundane through his virtuoso guitar skill, at some points sounding like a full orchestra was resonating from the lightest touch of each string.
The highlight of the night came in the acoustic section, with a beautifully gruff cover of Dylan’s Girl From The North Country, sung like a man who wanted to show his high school sweetheart his deepest feelings in a love song but got his more poetic buddy to write it for him.
Stills outlined the format of the show at the beginning; acoustic half, interval (oxygen and warm cocoa to the stage etc.) then “rock and roll music”; this style was also adopted by Stills’ former bandmate Neil Young when he played the same stage 6 months earlier in support of his Chrome Dreams II album. Young’s intimate acoustic set followed by an incendiary rock out re-established the so called ‘Godfather of Grunge’ as not only one of rock’s most idiosyncratically brilliant vocalists but also a guitarist of extraordinary talent. The most telling moment was in the encore of Stills’ performance, during a rousing version of For What It’s Worth, when the crowd were at their most animated, swaying and clapping their hands they still remained seated; by the second number in Young’s rock set, the crowd were dancing in the aisles.

David Harfield

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Mercy and Grand – The Tom Waits Project *****

Posted by davidharfield on January 15, 2009

Lowry Theatre, Manchester 
Monday 20 Oct 2008

The stage was carefully littered with an assortment of instruments that would not look out of place in a French bistro, as the audience was ushered in to the Lowry Theatre to witness what was billed as, “a meeting place between musicians and between songwriting traditions…where Kurt Weill bumps into Tom Waits, where Nino Rota…rubs shoulders with a slow gypsy waltz.” Not just another regurgitation of Pinter’s The Homecoming then. As eight disparate figures took to the stage all in smart black dress, each arming themselves with their preferred instrument, be it a microphone, electric guitar or harmonium, (no, me neither), the audience got the feeling that they were about to see something special. And they weren’t wrong.

As the band waltzed their way through violinist Joe Townsend original instumental composition Gypsy Tango, the operatically-trained vocalist sat on a bar stool and smiled enigmatically about the audience. This created a sense of intimacy so acute that it was all the male members of the audience could do to restrain themselves from asking to buy her a drink. (She is very pretty.) Jessica Walker then led her band of men (and one woman) through nine Waitsian songs that soared, whispered, howled and echoed through the wonderful acoustics at the Lowry, including Waits favourite Innocent When You Dream, which was so good she offered it again at the end as a reprise. Walker’s beautiful trills and piercing shrieks were in stark contrast to Waits’ raw, whisky ravaged groans, but could not have melded better with the tone and lyrics of his songs.

It wasn’t just the vocalist that got to show off her extraordinary talent; every member of the band got a chance in the spotlight, especially during the second half of the show when Waits songs were interspersed with traditional numbers and Weill’s What Keeps Mankind Alive? The charismatic pianist tinkled in Waitsian fashion during slower, bluesy numbers, while the guitarist noodled effortlessly around Walker’s melodies. However, the unsung star of the show had to be the percussionist, Simon Allen, who teased and bashed out complex rhythms with the most unusual style; at one point he began playing a musical saw, with a violin bow clamped between his teeth.

If this all sounds very baroque and dramatic it was because it was supposed to be; Waits’ songs are tales of heartbreak, loss, intoxication and romance, everything good theatre should be. In keeping with the theatrical tone, the fourth wall was never directly breached until the end, when the band took their bows and beamed at the audience knowing that they had done the old troubadour proud.

David Harfield

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