Flaxen-tressed rock lothario in roots music shock

Ah, more rock legends. Some would say that this one stands as tall in the pantheon as Neil Young and has, arguably, moved around his musical styles more frequently and with greater flexibility than the previously experienced wonder. Others might argue that he has a lot to answer for with the increasingly hysterical (how ever you want to interpret that word) rock behemoth Led Zeppelin leading astray all sorts of impressionable youth and other musicians. Yes it’s our old friend Percy aka Robert Plant who has taken to the road in the civilising company of Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett to perform their blend of roots and old classics to the masses. You will recall that they have a mega selling album out. Which may explain the choice of venues for this tour, most of them soul-less hangar-dromes, which may get the punters in but don’t lend themselves to the sort of music heard on the album. Maybe they were the bookings for the rumoured but so far unrealised Zeppelin reunion.
Anyway, off to the Cardiff International Arena for one of the early nights of the Europe end of their tour. Now the CIA – as it’s known – is a curious building being coloured an imaginative shade of brown on the outside (imaginative in the sense that you have to ask what on earth they were thinking of to paint it such a depressing colour) and being a vast open space on the inside. We were positioned almost level with the side of the stage and were able to appreciate the full enormity of the place.
But enough, onto the music. A brief blast of the support act had us scurrying to the bar until the main act appeared. Unfortunately if you’re playing an enormodome you need to work very hard on getting the acoustics right and particularly so if your line up includes fiddle, banjo and mandolin. Sadly they hadn’t got it fixed. But looked at differently this worked fantastically well on some of the ethereal Alison Krauss solo tracks – Down To The River To Pray was unbelievably haunting and magical as the echo floated around behind the voices. But on the other stuff it sounded less good. The album was all fine, the old Zeppelin tracks even worked well although the tribute to Sandy Denny was handled better on the burst of Matty Groves that materialised out of the ether (there’s those weird acoustics again – but I hold that it hadn’t been specifically set to produce that effect) rather than the specific dedication to Ms Denny.
Ultimately I have to resort to ambivalence. The band (fine performances from all but special mentions to T Bone Burnett himself, Buddy Miller and Stuart Duncan), Alison Krauss, even tea-swilling Robert Plant were all great. The venue was as uninvolving as it is possible to be with them on stage and us in our seats and a chill barrier between the two and this all fed back to the stage and you felt they were doing their jobs because they couldn’t feed off anything coming from the crowd and so there was no rapport. If it had been in an intimate – or even something half the size – venue then all this would have been resolved. But they wouldn’t have made as much money.

This one’s a big one – in more ways than one

An adventure to London to see a living legend. What do you do when confronted by the possibility of seeing someone perform who has impressed you and the critics and the masses for around 30 years, you’ve bought a stackful of their albums but somehow always missed live? In this case you do whatever it takes to obtain a ticket and then don’t believe that it is actually going to happen until you get inside the theatre and all the signs are that, yes, it is going to happen. At last. (This actually reads like a sub-Mills & Boon teen romance but there you go, it’s all true.) So it was for the trip to Hammersmith to see the mighty Neil Young. And it didn’t disappoint. In fact to make matters better, for those of us who can’t decide whether we like simple acoustic, folksy Neil or blasted out of the aural electric soundscape Neil, he was doing two sets – one of each.
So we started with acoustic Neil (actually not until after we’d had acoustic Pegi – his wife – using most of his band) with our man surrounded by around eight acoustic guitars, a psychedelically-splashed grand piano and a honky tonk upright. Not to mention all sorts of other bizarre stage equipment. Some serious film set size flood lighting, a native American statue (actually looking like an old cowboy film style red Indian in all honesty) stage right, an easel stage left, the stage open to the back so all the guts of the theatrical experience on display.
Anyway, back to the show. Now there are some for whom acoustic Neil is their dreamboat, the keening wail and the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar puts them into heaven. I have a sympathy with this view and have been known to croon along with Only Love Can Break Your Heart; Oh Lonesome Me (oh yes, I know all about heartbroken teenage angst). But I do not sympathise with that competitive school that has to be the first to recognise and applaud the first few notes of whatever he has started to play. And you notice this more in an acoustic setting. That said, the audience were impressively quiet once they’d got this testosterone bout out of the way. But the old man was great, responding to calls from the audience as and when it suited him and changing his mind about what he wanted to play but sometimes going ahead anyway despite his own concerns – generally not shared by the audience, particularly on his foray into a simplistic banjo number.
And then after the interval we had electric Neil with his grand guitar “Old Black” and a change of outfit from his off-white suit to a black paint-spattered suit. (The significance passed me by but if you can spot it then let’s hear it.)
Having chatted at the rear of the stage with the not-entirely-obvious-what-he-was-for artist with the easels and large canvases, Crazy Horse appeared, he moved to the front of the stage, the artist popped up a painting on the easel stage left which served to tell us what he was playing. (So it did make sense after all.) And he proceeded to play it at blistering volume with all sorts of electronic mayhem. Now, if anyone has stuck with the last year’s ramblings they will know that this strikes me as a damn fine thing. What I want from a live performer is something that I cannot get from sitting on the sofa listening to the albums (no matter how loud I turn them up). And this we got in major style. Starting with The Loner from his first solo album and proceeding to ricochet around his back-catalogue up to the latest Chrome Dreams 11 and then back round again we got a real blitz of just unbelievable force wringing and wrenching and throttling his guitar to play how he wanted it to sound. If you want a comparison then, better than any of his own live albums, the only one I can think of is Jimi Hendrix wrestling with Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Really. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. Not easy listening by any stretch and all the better for it. And then amongst the encores we had a beautiful version of Tonight’s the Night before finally ending with something called The Sultan (complete with live on-stage sultan!) which is, apparently, the very first item in his discography, you can’t plunder a back-catalogue much farther than that. So, living legend lives up to expectations. Excellent.

Home, home on the range

And so here we are high up in the Mendip Hills in the pitch January dark trying to look for an unlit village hall that’s set back from the road. So you look for the greatest concentration of lost souls. Yes, it’s folk night. But what a night. In Priddy Village Hall we have (after an impressive instrumental support slot from Tristan from Guildford) Martin Simpson, much acclaimed folk singer/ guitarist, mentioned in the same breath as Ry Cooder by some for his roots work (and we’re not talking teeth or gardening). A strange venue and the swansong of the Old Down Acoustic Club who chose this evening to bow out. Well what a show to go with. And for an aside on them, they have run a fairly amazing series of shows over the years – a Seth Lakeman performance in a pub in Litton stands out as a highlight – and I’m sure Cathy and John deserve a rest but hopefully they will be back to do the things they do.
Despite the slight weirdness of the venue – you half-expected the hall to be surrounded by God-knows-what and that we would have to escape back to civilisation guns blazing – the acoustics were great and Martin Simpson, armed only with a pair of acoustic guitars (am I overdoing this cowboy outlaw angle?) played and played. And also explained what he was up to and where the songs came from in between. Much of the material was from his last – and excellent – album but also thrown in was a Little Feat song that he had learned from a studio demo tape his friend (in California) had found and shipped over – but with an extra verse that didn’t make it to that album. Seasoned readers will know that anyone who knows and likes Lowell George is all right by me but who would think you can discover new stuff on one of California’s finest ever bands from the depths of the Mendip Hills. Cosmic or what?Anyway, it was all taken in the stride of the audience, don’t want to give too much away after all, reserve and all but, underneath it all, we all knew that we had been watching and listening to a fairly stratospheric talent (later confirmed by various awards from Radio 2) matched to deep humanity. What a wonderful man and cracking stuff. Staggering off back into the cold and dark with plenty to think about. Not least, two gigs into the year and they’re going great.

British Psych-folk-rock rides again

It’s January, and what happens in January? You can count on Robyn Hitchcock hoving into view and performing at the Fleece. Trust me, you can set your watch by him. After two – or is it three now? – years performing with the Venus Three (you know, the REM set) this was almost a solo appearance, aided by Terry Williams (I think – but not the Terry Williams I thought) on keyboard and trumpet. Although he also had his sisters on occasional backing vocals, Tim Keegan (who had had the support slot) and some old cohorts – Kimberley Rew on frenzied guitar (no wonder he only helped out on a few tracks) and Morris (or “Morris from Gloucester” as he is always welcomed onstage) on percussion – but those last two only came on at the end. This was, essentially, Robyn-night.
And what we were due to get was his concentration on I Often Dream of Trains. This was a bit of a surprise to me, never having heard of the album, but that’s why you go and see these people – to see what else they can do. And what he can do is still be entertaining and great and musical and so it goes from being completely unknown to something you’d like to hear again. (And this and others are pretty much all now re-released as far as I can tell.) But what – I suspect but will have to prove to myself – you don’t get on the album are the entertaining explanations and asides that splatter around in between the songs so making a grand evening of all round entertainment. I can’t help thinking that his continuing presence at the Fleece suggests that he is not as popular as he should be – although the Financial Times no less were featuring his upcoming show at the Royal Festival Hall so maybe it’s just a Bristol low profile. But if you want your winter blues shaken loose and dumped by the wayside (in a bio-degradable style) then this is your man – and in any format that he chooses to turn up. But for this year you’ve missed your chance. My guess is that he’ll be back – ooh, in January probably. If you want to see him in Bristol anyway.

Oh and by the way, Tim Keegan was good and worth checking out too.