Chuck Prophet, The Borderline, London, May 14th 2010
Al The Manc, Parky and I met in the Pillars before the gig to down a few pints (in my case, Westerham’s delicious single-hop Cascade ale) and put the world to rights. The conversation turned to the future of the music ‘business’, with me expressing my doubts about the long-term viability of big record companies or artists continuing to make substantial fortunes out of their music.
Artists have to do it for themselves increasingly these days, but if you keep touring and keep putting out enough songs your existing fans want to hear, there’s no reason why you can’t make a living out of it, if not a fortune. Chuck Prophet is one such artist – he made it relatively big briefly in the 80s with Green On Red and has subsequently carved out a solo career by permanently touring and recording. Oh, and he’s a great rock ‘n’ roll performer too – one of the very best.
Up on the small stage of The Borderline, Chuck and the band, including wife Steph on keyboards and vocals, launched into the hard chugging rock of Doubter Out Of Jesus from the excellent Soap And Water album. The band got into the groove very quickly and my toes didn’t stop tapping all night (and my head was doing the rock-nod too). We were treated to songs from all of Chuck’s solo career, from Queen Bee off 1990’s Brother Aldo album, to Love Won’t Keep Us Apart, Good Time Crowd, Hot Talk and the title track from last year’s ¡Let Freedom Ring!.
Apart from an amusing rant against Travelodge and a tribute to the late Alex Chilton, we didn’t have too much of the Chuck banter, but the music was superb throughout. The show’s highlights were last year’s slow-burner You And Me Baby (Holdin’ On), Elvis tribute Would You Love Me, from Soap And Water, and 1993’s straight up rock ‘n’ roller Balinese Dancer. Steph and Chuck also did a couple of songs without the rest of the band, prompting Al The Manc to suggest that they’re the Johnny and June of bar-room rock ‘n’ roll, which is a nice thought.
The absolute highspot of the show, though, was the lazy but insistent slow rocker Summertime Thing, from 2002’s No Other Love, which has proved to be a live favourite and rightly so. It’s just gorgeous. The band came back for two encores, Alex Chilton’s 1978 song Bangkok and Always A Friend, the song Chuck co-wrote with Alejandro Escovedo and which was popularised by Bruce Springsteen. That’s probably helped Chuck pay a few bills…
And now tell me that this isn’t one of the greatest summer songs:
Pavement, Brixton Academy, Brixton, May 13th 2010
For Astral and me, 1994 to about 1999 constituted our ‘baby gap’ years, when the demands of having a young family meant we didn’t get out much, except to Sainsburys to stock up on Pampers and cheap merlot. Pavement fell right into that gap – with the exception of their first album, Slanted And Enchanted, their career frankly passed us by. Their demise in 1999 went unnoticed in our household and, apart from seeing Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks at Green Man three years ago, they only came back on my radar when these reunion gigs were announced and I began to explore their uncharted back catalogue.
The sold-out Academy was packed as support band Broken Social Scene came on. This ever-changing Canadian line-up has had good press in recent years, and four guitars and two drum-kits has got to be worth a listen, but I was mildly disappointed. Most of the songs seemed to be new, but they suffered from Brixton Academy’s support band syndrome – crappy sound – and weren’t strong enough as songs. In fact, the instrumental episodes of their set were the best, without vocals and allowing the guitars to weave into one another. A mixed bag.
Pavement took the stage to a huge roar and launched into three songs – Grounded, Gold Soundz and Elevate Me Later – without pausing for breath. Quickly it became clear that they were having fun which, according to reports, wasn’t the case at the shows earlier in the week. The band were relaxed but the playing was tight and the sound was just on the edge of what the Academy can stand. I’ve mentioned before the challenge of getting good sound out of this venue, but Pavement and their team did very well.
As with Frontier Ruckus the night before, there’s a temptation of seeing laid-back or ‘slacker’ bands as somehow lazy or offhand in their playing. I’m sure nothing’s further from the truth – Pavement really impressed with the power and cohesion of their playing, despite the larking about. True, we had a couple of false starts, but that’s par for the course with them, by all accounts.
The crowd was up for a good time, too, and I enjoyed being in a packed venue without having someone throw beer at me, vomit on my shoes or spend the whole gig shouting at his drunk girlfriend and taking camera-phone snaps of his even drunker mates. The crowd did a lot of singing along, notably on Shady Lane, Summer Babe and the excellent rant Two States – this last song being one of their entertaining North California diatribes against SoCal and its thirst for the North’s water and other resources:
Two states!
We want two states!
North and south,
Two, two states
Forty million daggers…
Two states!
We want two states!
There’s no culture,
There’s no spies,
Forty million daggers…
This is also one of their songs that sounds most like The Fall in its relentless rhythm and ranting vocals. Indeed Pavement have been slagged off by Mark E Smith as copycats, but he’s clearly never really listened to them closely. Yes, you can spot strands of Fall-ish music in theirs, but there are also great dollops of Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Nirvana and others.
The North-South California conflict is picked up too in Unfair:
Up to the top of the Shasta Gulch
And to the bottom of the Tahoe lakes,
Man-made deltas and concrete rivers,
The south takes what the north delivers.
I did a bit of delving into the history of California and the Northwest and had no idea the extent to which water plays such an important part in the politics of those states (despite having seen Chinatown many times) and was amused to find this old poster (left) expressing the conflict in a very graphic way.
The influence of The Fall also shows itself in some of the song titles, such as Zurich Is Stained, but what’s striking about Pavement tonight is how rock ‘n’ roll they are – no longer leaders of some indie fringe, but players who can make a claim on the heights of the mainstream too. It’s idle to speculate what would have happened if they hadn’t split up eleven years ago, but the sheer musicality and energy of songs like In The Mouth A Desert make you wonder what might have been – and if they can stay together long enough this time to take their creativity further. We shall see.
If you don’t care much for this review, take a look at John Mulvey’s fine review on the Uncut website. In fact, sign up for his blog posts as he’s a perceptive and enthusiastic critic who happens to share many of my tastes, which helps… Meanwhile, entertain yourself with Pavement’s In The Mouth A Desert from a couple of weeks ago in Dublin:
Rustie Jim M has been saying good things about this Michigan band for a while now, so after checking them out on MySpace and various podcasts and radio shows, I decided to go along and see them for myself. Their gig at The Windmill last year was well received and the place began to fill up as support the Treetop Flyers raced through their fine set of CSNY-tinged country-rock numbers. Time was tight, though – the gig had a strict 10.45 curfew, as there was to be a late show featuring Spiral Stairs, the band led by Pavement guitarist Scott Kannberg. Pavement themselves were playing down the road at the Academy and I wondered about sticking around after this show to hang out with the beautiful people, but then I thought naah – must get sleep, and I’ll be seeing Pavement on Thursday anyway.
I said ‘hi’ to Frontier Ruckus at the merch table and asked them when they’d flown in. They said they’d come in that morning and they looked shattered, poor lads – and they’d failed to get the bass guitar through Heathrow. I replied, perhaps uncharitably, “Well, at least it was only a bass,” which went down well with all of them except the bass guitarist… I made up for my rudeness by buying their CD, The Orion Songbook.
Front-man Matthew Milia introduced the first song, Silverfishes, and they launched into the set as if jet-lag didn’t exist. The sound at The Windmill can be iffy, but they quickly settled in, with David Winston Jones on banjo adding a bluegrass flavour to Millia’s more indie folk style, ably backed by Zachary Nichols on trumpet and saw, and Ryan Etzcorn on drums.
What strikes you right away about them is Milia’s singing and his lyrics. The words pour out of him, and thankfully this isn’t a case of sixth-form poetry or logorrhoea, but of a fine songwriting sensibility that promises much. Alas, it’s not possible to catch all his words, and sometimes it might help when playing live to tone down the louder band moments so as not to drown out Milia’s narratives, but by and large they get it right.
The next song, Mona And Emmy, about past loves, shows several thematic strands that run through the songs – a keen eye for childhood memories; a sense of place, particularly Detroit and its surroundings; and observations on love and all of its failings as well as its triumphs. These strands tie up to create a nostalgia that gives the songs a wistful edge, even when they’re sounding upbeat. Here’s a snatch of Rosemont, a song about a street in Detroit:
And everybody dying here has made it back to Rosemont Street,
The roses shake, the sidewalk aches and Detroit air is hissing at our feet.
And from Latter Days:
And in those trash-pit-ponds you bathe and
Oh, how you all gleam,
Mindlessly bright where you’re wet in
Your eye-lashing, fluid-splashing, rapid-flashing
Canal-bleaching dream
For me.
At times, Milia’s lyrics remind me of Gene Clark’s more Dylanesque language games – here’s an extract from Mount Marcy:
Feel the bushes, brambles rambling,
Ample sapling, suckling all the air
And the North from Marcy’s hair.
Some of the slower and softer numbers are reminiscent of Gene as well, but overall the sound is very much modern American indie folk rock. After the show, Astral confessed that she doesn’t really understand or appreciate this style, and prefers the downbeat indie folk rock of Centro-matic and their ilk. I know what she means, but I think many younger American bands have a keener ‘pop’ sensibility (for want of a better word) in striving to be crowd-pleasers. With some bands, that grates and annoys, but usually it’s fine by me. What it also does is show up a difference I often see between young American and British bands. The former have a sense of dedication and commitment to what they’re doing that belies what can look like slackness or laid-backness. The latter, by contrast, often seem reluctant to put themselves forward and be serious (but not solemn) about themselves. We’re in an era where you’re simply not going to get record companies backing every promising band with publicity and marketing, so you’d better be prepared to do it yourself. And Frontier Ruckus are doing just that – good luck to ’em.
Here’s a video from a few weeks ago of the band performing what to me was the highlight of their set, Adirondack Amish Holler:
We love our families,
We love our twilight trees,
We love our memories,
Salt pours out to the river.
There on the swamp edge,
Skies north of the mountains,
My eyes pulse like fountains
And salt pours out to the river.
Hauschka, James Blackshaw and Nancy Elizabeth, The Barbican Centre, London, May 10th 2010
We really didn’t know what to expect of this gig. James Blackshaw was the incentive to go, Nancy Elizabeth sweetened the deal and Hauschka we had no idea about. The evening was billed as ‘Kept Impulses’, a cryptic title that had me slightly worried – events at the Barbican can sometimes be artsier-than-thou, and I didn’t want to be surrounded by po-faced culture vultures pretending to enjoy themselves. Musical director for the evening was David Coulter, who has worked closely with Tom Waits, Damon Albarn and others, so, as Astral and the Amber Stalker suggested, the evening had a whiff of ‘curated’ and ‘collaboration’ about it, which sometimes doesn’t bode well. You can’t force what can’t happen, but let’s see… and you don’t want to miss the chance of seeing guitar maestro James Blackshaw…
As it turned out, I think there was far less collaboration than perhaps intended. Certainly, good use was made of the backing ensemble, but I’m not sure the three leading players had prepared or created much in the way of genuinely collaborative material. That wasn’t a problem, though, as between them their music is compelling enough, as the first half of the evening’s performance showed. 
James was first on and picked his way brilliantly through River Of Heaven, which I first heard on Volume 2 of the amazing and wonderful Imaginational Anthems three-volume set. He followed that with Stained Glass Windows from The Cloud Of Unknowing and I was struck, not for the first time, by how meditative his music is. Tunes and ideas get repeated almost the point of breakdown, but it’s clearly deliberate – to force the listener to think, but not necessarily in a conscious or purposive way. His music is always in some sense ‘pretty’ but frequently quite demanding and fascinating in its ability to manipulate and massage the mind with insistent textures and patterns.
By contrast, Nancy Elizabeth is a much more straightforward proposition – a very talented musician and singer who straddles all sorts of musical boundaries through folk, pop, classical, torchsong and more. She also disarmingly mentioned that they didn’t really know what to wear for the evening and that she was in her ‘poshest’ frock. That’s one drawback with many ‘contemporary’ concerts at the Barbican – the surroundings can overawe the musicians – but she rose above it and did a very pretty set on piano, harp and guitar.
Hauschka, aka Volker Bertelmann from Düsseldorf, made his name as a composer and player of ‘prepared piano’, as inspired by the shenanigans of John Cage and other avant garde composers and pianists. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what we got was more relaxed and fun that I feared – worthy, dark Teutonism is not my bag. Anyway, his ‘prepared piano’ involves putting all sorts of stuff into the instrument to affect the strings – rattles, sticks, bells and so on. He performed four improvisations, which were, by and large, gentle and faintly hypnotic, but the fourth was definitely fun. For this one, he painstakingly removed all the bits and pieces from inside the piano and then emptied a plastic bag full of ping-pong balls into it. The piece involved striking keys so as to make the balls pop up into the air – definitely not dark or worthy.
The second half began with James in front of the full ensemble performing a wonderful version of his piece Cross. The orchestrated piece reminded me not just of the more obvious minimalist composers – Reich, Glass etc – but also the more romantic and devotional proto-minimalists such as the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Nancy Elizabeth kept up the standard with two fine songs Lay Low and Feet Of Courage, and a humming song we were all encouraged to join in with. The ensemble backed up her simple sound well, as they did for Hauschka’s next four pieces, all based on places of significance to him. This time, the piano was ‘unprepared’, giving a much more straightforward, melodic style.
The last piece of the evening, entitled 1,000 Angels, was the only genuine three-part collaboration of the evening (though each had helped out with some of the others’ pieces) and once again, the hypnotic harmonies and gently falling chords reminded me of Pärt. The piece had been put together in just a few days and I enjoyed it, but overall the evening was a mixed bag. A lot of the evening’s music was compelling, but all three of the principals are more used to working alone and it showed.
After enjoying Nancy Wallace and Jason Steel earlier this month, I was glad we’d got tickets to this intimate little evening at the Green Note. Since the last time we’d seen them, I’d got the recent Jason Steel album, Fire Begot Ash, which I like very much. There’s a lot of traditional finger-picking in the style of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham in there, but also some more spooky old-time music and off-kilter, weird folk songs, sung in his disarmingly gentle voice.
This being a fRoots event, editor Ian Anderson was in evidence, so I bought a discounted copy of the magazine to avoid the possibility of him him pestering us like some folkie Big Issue seller. It was also nice to get a free mini-CD of Nancy and Jason, limited to 15 copies for those at this evening’s show.
Jason kicked off the show, alternating between banjo and guitar, and his first song was Blue Moon. The lad is from Doncaster, so I doubt that it was a tribute to Manchester City, and I avoided singing the Aston Villa version, Blue Nose, for the benefit of The Suit, whose major flaw is supporting Birmingham City. Next up was one of Jason’s own weird -but-good numbers, Lycanthrope Stomp, followed by a traditional song of much saucy naughtiness, Bonny Black Hare. He then shared with us his love of bats (the flying rather than cricketing kind) and finished off his set with a very intricate bat-inspired instrumental. Jason’s guitar- and banjo-playing is extremely proficient, but his blunt humour and distinctive voice lend a welcome personal edge to his music.
Nancy decided to ignore her setlist and performed a really good collection of songs, including traditional numbers, her own compositions and folk-infused cover versions, including Richard Thompson’s Withered And Died and Alan Bell’s moving Alice White:
My name is Alice White, I’d have you all to know,
I left my father’s farm, a long long time ago,
My mother called me a silly lass, she said I’d rue the day
That I followed on the heels of the navvies.
Her own songs Everything’s Finer and Walking Into Walls were intimate and warm, while we were treated to not one but two traditional dead sailor songs, The Welcome Sailor and The Drowned Lover:
And all in the churchyard these two were laid,
And a stone for remembrance was laid on her grave,
My joys are all ended, my pleasures are fled,
This grave that I lie in is my new married bed.
I’m a big fan of Nancy’s clear, unaffected voice, while her guitar and concertina skills are fine too. I’m looking forward to her second album, due out sometime later this year on the excellent Rif Mountain label.
For the final set of the night, they both came on to play nearly all traditional songs, including Blow The Candles Out, Polly On The Shore and Jack Hall. Their dual guitar-playing was tight and their voices blended well, but the highspot of the evening was when Jason played on his own and Nancy stood up (she said she can’t sit down for this song) for a superb rendition of Blackwaterside, which I’d raved about when we saw them last month. Nancy’s voice really is very reminiscent of Anne Briggs’, while Jason’s guitar-playing showed off lots of fluid runs and cadenzas that lifted the song into very different and more exotic soundscapes.
The last song of the night was Leadbelly’s standard Goodnight, Irene, which we were all encourage to join in with, and Jason insisted we sing the real line “… I’ll get you in my dreams” rather than the more common “… I’ll see you in my dreams”. Indeed, it does add a more ominous and desperate edge to the song, which fits the spookiness of much of Jason’s sound. They popped back for a well-deserved encore, Nancy’s Sleeping Sickness, before we toddled off into the night.
All of 27 years ago, despite the triumph of the synth bands and back-combed boys and girls, there were a few promising signs in the world of music – REM, the Dream Syndicate, Green On Red and Hüsker Dü were all on my radar. Then I heard a phenomenal song on the radio – a thrilling cover of Dylan’s Absolutely Sweet Marie – but in the pre-Internet days, I didn’t find out who recorded it until I asked at a record shop a week or so later. That was when I first heard of Jason and the Scorchers, the finest cowpunk countrybilly band to come out of Nashville.
Evergreen front-man Jason Ringenberg has often toured solo, more recently as kids’ entertainer ‘Farmer Jason’ with the marvellous zoological songs Ode To A Toad, Moose On The Loose and the immortal Punk Rock Skunk. But his first love is the band, Jason and the Scorchers, and its excellent country-rock guitarist since the early days, Warner E Hodges. The phrase ‘country-rock’ usually brings to mind Gram Parsons et al, but Hodges is genuinely a mix of country music (both his parents were Nashville country musicians) and hard rock (he was a huge fan of AC/DC and Kiss). Jason, meanwhile, was always a lover of punk, but yearned for more. As he said in 1983, he wanted his band to sound ‘like a religious service, only a lot dirtier…’ and back then they made a pretty good job of it, so I’d been looking forward to this gig for a while.
Support band The Whybirds, from Bedford, were solid enough rockers, with elements of Rainbow, Rory Gallagher and even the Only Ones, and did themselves no harm to my ears by including a rather fine cover of Neil Young’s F*!#in’ Up.
After The Suit, Pugnacious D and I had recharged our glasses, Jason and the band roared on stage. They got ‘the hit’ out of the way after just three songs (which had included oldie Shop It Around and catchy new number Mona Lee) to set up an evening of hard-driving country punkabilly. Jason was wearing his trademark shiny cowboy hat and a really rather extraordinary silver frill shirt, about which he quipped, ‘You can’t always sound good but you can always look good…’ His inter-song banter is spot on and he doesn’t overdo the flogging of the new album, Halcyon Times, even though we get to hear most of the songs off it this evening, including Land Of The Free, Beat On The Mountain, Twang Town Blues, Mother Of Greed, We’ve Got It Goin’ On and Deep Holy Water.
Remarkably, all the new songs stand up very well against the oldies and goodies, and there’s more than an element of social commentary to them. In fact, there’s a clear link between this hopped-up country-rock and some of the better London bands of the 80s such as The Men They Couldn’t Hang and The Pogues, where the ‘folk’ element corresponds almost exactly to American ‘country’.
Then there was a break from the whole band as just Jason and Warner took the limelight. Jason introduced the scary song he co-wrote with Steve Earle, A Bible And A Gun:
Now I hear her whisper soft and low
Through every mile I run,
As I travel through this world of woe
With a Bible and a gun.
Then we had Jason’s joke (‘What’s the difference between a puppy and a singer-songwriter? A puppy eventually stops whining…’) followed by a fine bit of country yodelling on Pray For Me Mama (I’m A Gypsy Now). When the rest of the band returned, the evening rocked to a finale brilliantly with McGuinn’s and Parsons’ Drugstore Truck Drivin’ Man, new number Deep Holy Water (with its nod to Southern religious gothic author Flannery O’Connor) and 1984’s Broken Whiskey Glass. Next was my unexpected highlight of the night, new song Moonshine Guy, a speedy punky rock ‘n’ roll number with great lyrics:
He yells and he roars,
Loves the Stones, hates the Doors,
Thinks the Beatles sing for girls,
He’s a moonshine guy in a six-pack world.
As an evening it was just so much fun as well as rockin’. The final encore was the mighty White Lies, released just a year after Absolutely Sweet Marie:
Yes, I know, this is becoming something of a habit, but it seemed like a Friday lunchtime free treat that was too hard to resist. Mr P and I occasionally meet up on Friday lunchtime or early evening for whatever free music is around (usually at the Southbank), and he was easily persuaded to head off to this one, opposite London’s historic Smithfield Market.
I’d never been to Pure Groove before, but it certainly ticked all the right boxes – records, CDs, free wifi, books and magazines to borrow, in-store live stage, comfy sofas, toasted sandwiches and a bar. I settled down with a delicious pint of Dark Star’s IPA (Mr P had a Fentiman’s ‘Curiosisty Cola’) to enjoy another dose of The Wilderness of Manitoba, and once again they didn’t disappoint. The two City boys eating and drinking behind us were talking loudly about bonds, spreads and other assorted financial-alchemical nonsense, but soon buggered off when they realised that folky harmonies weren’t really their thing (they probably listen to Kasabian).
The band’s set was similar to before, but as good as ever and I think Mr P appreciated them too. We’ll be seeing them again at the End Of The Road Festival in September, but I took the opportunity after they’d finished to say ‘hello’ and tell them how much I like what they’re doing. Lovely bunch of people and great music. Here they are with Octoberman performing a fine raggedy-arse version of Neil Young’s Pardon My Heart at last Tuesday’s gig at The Slaughtered Lamb.
If you wanted to escape the mindless pundit-babble of election-night TV, the Union Chapel was the perfect bolt-hole – gentle music, manageable egos and no hot air. In fact, it can get quite chilly in the austere church, but that’s part of its charm.
I wasn’t familiar with opening act Withered Hand, the alter ego of Edinburgh singer-songwriter Dan Willson, who looks like a regular busker, but plays droll songs with some bite. Mojo describes his music as ‘lapsed evangelical folk nouveau’, and there’s enough religion-tinged angst to justify that, but it’s his sardonic observations of our faults and delusions that make his songs worth listening to. And I’m always going to be won over by a drug song which includes the phrase ‘Knocking on Kevin’s door’.
Laura Gibson was as quietly impressive as when I saw her last month at The Borderline, but this time she was funny too. She came on and said that this was the last date of her tour, so they’d ‘give it all we’ve got… in a gentle, folky way…’ Highlights were slow-burners Where Have All Your Good Words Gone and Funeral Songs, along with Sweet Deception and Nightwatch.
She was keen to involve the audience with two sing-alongs and one percussion-along involving claps, stomps and sets of keys, which was actually quite fun. Here’s a fine video of her talking about her album and singing Funeral Songs:Calgary’s Woodpigeon is the brain-child of Mark Andrew Hamilton and although you could pigeonhole (sorry…) them as part of the beardie nu-folk movement, there’s a lot more going on – sometimes too much, perhaps. Their music is a sort of folk-edged chamber-pop and many of the songs are finely wrought and tight, while others suffer from just too many swoops of louder and quieter passages.
Their recent album, Die Stadt Muzikanten, has been described as ‘cinematic’, which is pretty accurate. The songs sound like a soundtrack, but in concert, that’s a difficult trick to pull off. Without visual narrative and an explicit cohesion, the ear and eye can tend to wander.
Woodpigeon have been compared to Sufjan Stevens, whose concerts are similarly challenging in that the audience isn’t quite sure if they’re seeing a spectacle or just enjoying a set of songs. There were good things, though, notably a song about a little-known London landmark, Postman’s Park in the heart of the City. The tiny park includes a wall of hand-painted tiles bearing tributes to Londoners who gave their lives for others. While looking at this, the ‘Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice’, lead-singer and songwriter Mark was particularly moved by the story of twelve-year-old David Selves, whose fate is described on the tiles thus:
The Wilderness of Manitoba and Octoberman, The Slaughtered Lamb, Clerkenwell, May 4th 2010
Day two of my stalking a bunch of Canadian musicians…. no wait, that’s not fair. I’m just happy with the idea that if you like something, then do it again. I’d enjoyed The Wilderness of Manitoba at The Windmill, so I decided to see them again at The Slaughtered Lamb, courtesy of the excellent Electroacoustic Club. The promoter Will said ‘hi’ as he’d recognised my name from lots of ticket-holder lists and it was good to have a mini-chat with him as I filed into the club – just after The Magic Numbers, as it happened. Will promotes Mondays to Wednesdays at The Slaughtered Lamb as well as at The Luminaire, Cargo, the Union Chapel and elsewhere through ‘Pull Up The Roots’, and a very fine set of acts he books too.
The place was busier than I’d imagined, but then I saw the banner behind the stage (obscuring the upside-down pentagram) – ‘Canadian Blast’. It turns out this is ‘a platform run by the Canadian Independent Music Association to promote and develop Canadian talent around the world’. Hmmm… I wasn’t quite sure about the ‘Blast’ bit – the evening couldn’t possibly have been less explosive, but you know what marketing people are like. So the place was full of Canucks, which was fine by me, as they’re lovely people, except that they’re fatally attracted to the ghastly Sleeman’s Canadian beer that they coincidentally serve in The Slaughtered Lamb. I guess every nation has its terrible flaws.
The start of the non-explosive proceedings was Octoberman, a singer-songwriter from Toronto. I hadn’t heard any of his music and suspected a Neil Young-alike. Battered acoustic guitar? Check. Harmonica with holder? Check. Check shirt? Check… He began with Ambulance Chasing, which was rather more Elliott Smith than Neil Young, but his second song was a touching tribute to his grandparents and showed a wider musical vista.
Octoberman eating up his Cheerios
He then invited the three fellas from The Wilderness of Manitoba and the set became livelier and more fun. In fact, Marc ‘Octoberman’ said he normally plays with a band, so perhaps I was being unfair on him by suggesting he was a wallflower. Indeed, as travel becomes more expensive and music less lucrative, quite a number of artists travel solo through necessity, which gives an interesting insight not only into their solo chops, but also into the nature of their songs when they’re stripped of the comfort blanket of a band. I remember a great evening at The Borderline a couple of years ago with Gary Louris of The Jayhawks. He’d meant to bring a band over to Europe, but failed, so he said he could do an evening of solo songs, many of which he’d never performed solo in public before. The evening turned out great – funny and intimate – so every cloud and all that.
Octoberman and his compadres pleased the Canadian crowd even more with a ragged but righteous version of Neil Young’s Pardon My Heart before closing with a couple more of his own songs. A fine set.
The Wilderness of Manitoba played almost the same set as the previous night, but it was just as good and just as much fun. I hadn’t mentioned that Scott the singer goes barefoot on stage, perhaps in hippie homage to Graham Nash, and his blowing of the owl whistle is impressive again – though bashing Melissa’s singing bowl as if it were one of John Bonham’s cymbals is definitely uncool…
Once more, the singing was spot on, without being clinical, while the playing, particularly by Will on guitar and Stefan on cello, was top-notch. None of this stopped the evening from feeling relaxed and friendly, thankfully. And this time, I’d taken enough cash to buy their EP. Apparently a full album is out this summer, so that’ll be a definite purchase for the sunny days ahead.
The Wilderness of Manitoba, Artur Dyjecinski and Shady Bard, The Windmill, Brixton, May 3rd 2010
A bit of a spur of the moment gig this one. I’d noted it down as a ‘possible’, then Astral did her MySpace quality check and we decided to head out for some Canadian folk-rock, and I’m very happy that we did.
We arrived just after Gig Mike, who claimed to have had his arm twisted to go, but he goes to even more gigs than I do, so I doubt the twisting was too severe. Before the two main acts, Birmingham’s Shady Bard (a band rather than a dodgy poet) entertained with some indie-symphonic rock-pop that was quite catchy in places. Despite some sound problems, the six of them got a nice thing going with the keyboards, cello, French horn and trumpet. Astral and I agreed that it’s difficult to use a trumpet in rock music without it being ‘a bit like Calexico’, which was further emphasised by their sprinkling of Latin melodies.
Next on was Artur Dyjecinski, a Polish-Canadian singer-songwriter who spends much of his time in London. Accompanied by Jess on bass and vocals, Ania on guitar and Julian on drums, he invoked a warm world of country-folk, but with enough pepper in it to lift it out of the ordinary. His full baritone voice is reminiscent of big Robert from Willard Grant Conspiracy, and the songs have elements in common too, though Artur’s feel less introverted and more expansive than Willard Grant’s have become.
There’s also plenty of Neil Young in Artur’s songs, but he’s picked up other influences too, through pop, rock and reggae. The songs, by and large, are very straightforward, which is fine by me as I’m a ‘less is more’ person, but the interplay of guitars – and sometimes the guitars with harmonica – lends enough texture to make the music always listenable and really very good. I must get his CD…
There’s been quite revival in recent years of the multi-part harmonies made famous by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (and, to an extent, The Beach Boys), but to my ears, a lot of this genre falls rather short musically. In their earnestness to get the harmonies absolutely spot on, a number of young beardie harmony bands perhaps lose sight of the absolute necessity of having strong songs to back up the sound.
You’ll probably guess that I didn’t join in last year’s mad clamour to praise Fleet Foxes to the skies. I like their sound and there are a few catchy melodies in there, but waiting for Neil Young to come on at last year’s brilliant Hyde Park gig, I stood in front of Fleet Foxes wondering if all the songs were meant to sound the same. In their defence, the clamour was one of those phenomena over which they had little control and at times last year, on TV and on stage, they looked ever so slightly puzzled as to why they’d been picked out for adoration.
On the face of it, Toronto’s Wilderness of Manitoba might seem like they come from the same stable – warm acoustic guitars and banjo, woodsy production, multi-part harmonies etc – but I sensed from listening to their MySpace page that there was something more going on… or rather less. The songs (like Artur’s before them) aren’t complicated, and their strength lies in strong melodies and harmonies which complement the music rather than swamp it.
The four of them took to the stage with an intriguing set of instruments – guitar, cello and two singing bowls – but I was immediately taken by their fine singing. Front-man Will Whitwham holds the songs together well, assisted by Melissa Dalton, Scott Bouwmeester and Stefan Banjevic. The four coalesce very attractively, and I wonder whether having a female voice in the mix helps take the music away from that over-imitated Fleet Foxes sound. It also helps that they clearly have a lot of fun singing and the enjoyment is infectious. Indeed, you feel at times like you’re sitting round a campfire having a wonderful sing-song with not a Kumbaya in sight… Instruments are swapped between band members and included ukelele, banjo and bodhran.
The sense of humour is evident in their second song of the night, spooky number The Great Hall, which tells of shadowy spectres, but which uses the band’s ‘oo-oo’ harmonies to suggest scary ghosts. The next song, St Petersburg, reminded me of the calm, languorous sound of 80s band Hugo Largo, one of the great long-lost talents of that era, while the following one, November, had more than a passing resemblance to CSN’s Helplessly Hoping, as Astral whispered to me.
Then came two rather more personal songs, Orono Park, about Scott’s hometown, and Evening, a song written by Will’s late mother way back in 1968. The band said it was an emotional link between them and the original hippies, and a very lovely song it is too. After Dreamcatchers and a final song whose title I didn’t catch, the band came back for a well-deserved encore. Melissa said it was the song that brought them together and the first they’d rehearsed… Helplessly Hoping, which made Astral and me smile, but it was a strong and fine rendition.
The Windmill is a great venue for this sort of show – intimate, warm (literally on this chilly night) and fun, and I enjoyed myself so much that I decided to go and see the band again the next day at the Slaughtered Lamb. It’s not that extravagant – I only paid £5 for this evening’s entertainment and tomorrow’s is all of £6. These two nights together will cost about one-eighteenth of the price of one ticket for Simply Red’s concert at the O2 in December. I think you know which I’d prefer to go to…
A Gig's A Gig 