If you live near the Shawlands area on the south side of Glasgow you might have seen Robin Adams striding along, usually with his guitar in bag strapped to his back, his lion’s mane head of hair flowing in the wind, he’s quite a striking sight. Fortunately, he’s quite a striking musician as well with his previous albums gathering a bit of a cult following, similar to that of the late Nick Drake three decades ago when Drake was known to only a few cognoscenti. Reviews of Adams’ previous works have compared him to Drake and John Martyn (the Martyn comparison is odd other than that they share a Glaswegian background) but there are some elements of Drake to be found here. There’s a melancholic feel to the lyrics and a bucolic air in the music but the comparison ends there, to these ears it’s the likes of Roy Harper, Robin Williamson, Bert Jansch and Will Oldfield who come to mind with beguiling melodies and lyrics that can be darkly beautiful.
Adams stares that The Garden was influenced by his thoughts on Vincent Van Gogh, the painter’s struggles with his internal turmoil, his darkness and light. However, the album’s hazy sameness, an almost repetitive search for peace recalls another painter, Monet who captured the likes of Reims Cathedral in different lights at different times of the day trying to capture the illusive nature of light. Monet ended his years obsessively painting his garden at Giverny. As with light so with sounds and Adams, perched in his bedroom overlooking his garden, offers variations on this theme.
Overall The Garden is the sound of one man and his guitar. Occasional harmonica, keyboard, percussion and bass intrude and there’s a cello on one of the songs. A fine guitarist with a wisp of a voice that only occasionally betrays its Glaswegian origin, Adams roots around in the soul of despair. He cites Rimbaud’s description of a soldier’s corpse (Sleeper In The Valley) as inspiration and this is most obvious on the apocalyptic lyrics of Collision Course that closes the album while the opening song, The Garden is full of foreboding with spilled blood fuelling the garden’s growth. Paint Me The Day is almost iridescent as Adams sings of “burning red skies over fields of gold flowing like rivers of colour all born from your soul.” Packed full of beautiful metaphors it’s a powerful plea for love. Throughout the album Adams displays a fantastic poetic bent, his words paint pictures, impressionistic, not story telling but allied to the slight Americana touch in Keep Me or the naked guitar lines of Troubled Skies he is riveting, demanding a replay to properly savour the songs. The Garden isn’t an album to put on as background music, it demands and repays close attention and the rewards are there with Street a magnificent meditation on the fragility of the human condition. With the devastating opening lines “your heart is made of paper, your life is made of glass so beware of those who reach for you” delivered over a rippling guitar that recalls Arthur Lee’s Love on Forever Changes, the end result is sublime. Meanwhile Need Not Turn is perhaps the best song Will Oldham hasn’t yet written.
The Garden is a wonderful listen for those who delve into the nooks and crannies of a songwriter’s mind, it flows, brackish and dark perhaps, but seeking an outlet.
Robin Adams is launching the album at Glasgow’s Glad Cafe on Saturday 4th April.
Tag Archives: The Glad Cafe
The Rulers Of The Root/Kings Of Cheeze. Glad Cafe, Glasgow. Saturday 22nd November.
Trilogies are all the rage these days, a bit of a nasty hobbit I think but here’s Blabber’n’Smoke jumping on the three piece bandwagon with our third post on The Rulers Of The Root within the last fortnight. This flurry of activity was occasioned by the release of the band’s debut album, Porky Dreams which was given an official launch at the Southside’s Glad Cafe on Saturday. A packed venue saw the cafe’s staff running around looking for extra seating and a bit of a log jam at the bar, the only standing space available. Either the Rulers have a hell of a lot of family and friends or that the lure of picking up the album for a cut price one night only deal was too tempting an offer to refuse.
Fired up by the very enthusiastic crowd the band turned in a stellar set with the majority of the songs plucked from the album while others hinted at a fine follow up. Singer Patrick Gillies was on great form with his bagful of props put to good use as he careened through the rousing I’m Spartacus and bellowed mightily on the piratical Rose Of Jericho. With Mick Murphy and Chris Quinn anchoring the sound guitarist John Palmer slashed and burned throughout, his guitar razor sharp with some fantastic Wilco Johnson like fury on I’m Spartacus. Cat Fur was a highlight with its Beefheart growling while I’ll Be Your Doctor If You’ll Be My Nurse came across like some bawdy lovechild of Boris Pickett and Ian Dury. As befits a special gig some guests were invited up to join in the musical mayhem with Palmer’s wife, Fiona, playing ukulele on the slinky voodoo of Colon Man while their daughter, Lucy, added some haunting harmonies to the cowboy lope along of Charlie. Veteran Southside keyboard player, Alan French (AKA the Great White Shark according to Gillies), was also on hand to add his expertise to Charlie and the Bossa Nova groove of Sinaloa. Despite the oven like heat album favourites such as White On Rice, Maillot Jeune and Murdoch Browns were despatched with a degree of fury as the band all but melted on stage. The queue at the end of the show at the merch table was testament to the audience enjoyment.
If you weren’t there then you can get a hold of the album from The New Hellfire Club in The Hidden Lane and Love Music.
We should mention the opening act, Edinburgh’s Kings Of Cheeze, an act new to me. Semi acoustic, they put on an energetic set that veered from Lena Lovitsch like vocals from singer Trish Murry to a kind of mutated Ry Cooder meets Pere Ubu contortions with guitarist Dave Gray moaning and whistling as he jerked out some fine jazzy guitar runs. An infectious bunch they were jumping up and down in their seats as they played and are well worth further investigation.
The Rulers Of The Root
Debut albums are generally the domain of youth, pimpled adolescents unleashing pent up formative years of angst, doubt, unrequited love perhaps. So it’s strangely comforting to find that Glasgow band, The Rulers Of the Root, are, if not grizzled, at least able to recall when pubs were shut on Sundays and buying music meant a trip into town on a weekend. Their album, Porky Dreams, is released officially next Saturday with a launch gig at The Glad Cafe on the south side. It’s a tremendous album that showcases singer Patrick Gillies‘ excellent wordplay, a slightly absurdist take on life that comes across at times as stream of consciousness, at other times emulating the likes of Ian Dury with a fine feel for the shape and sound of language. Delivered with gusto in a manner reminiscent of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits or Nick Cave the words are well matched by the band’s well-drilled and finely honed music. While they visit several styles on the album there’s a precision to the playing that has come from extensive rehearsals and a long history of listening to tight units such as The Blockheads and The Magic Band. Guitarist John Palmer and bassist Mick Murphy have a lifetime of playing in bands behind them while drummer Chris Quinn has a similar if less lengthy pedigree. With three of the band working in sound engineering there’s ears aplenty to fine tune the music and the end result is Porky Dreams, years in the making perhaps but with a spring in its step as well as its tail.
With the album pressed and plans well afoot for the launch Blabber’n’Smoke met up with three of the band and we started off by asking how they got together and past glories.
John: Three of us work together while Mick is an old friend of mine through my wife. He knew her brother, Malcolm Duffin, a drummer. Mick played in Glasgow bands in the eighties and for the past few years he’s been playing in Clash tribute bands. I played in several bands in the eighties.
Chris: I played in a few bands in the eighties but I’ve always been on the other side of the fence as a sound engineer. It’s a refreshing change to be on this side for a change.
Patrick: I’ve got no musical history. At the risk of boring you, about ten years ago, Nancy, my wife, bought me a guitar because I’d been wanting to play one for years. Like any teenager I could play Sunshine Of Your Love on one string but I started buying songbooks by the likes of Ray Davies and such and tried to play them in my ham-fisted way. Anyway, I eventually started writing songs and played them to John who thought they were quite promising. They were really like dead bodies these songs but John did his Dr. Frankenstein on them, revived them, put some glitter on them. After that, it was like a leaking tap. I just kept on writing songs to the point where we’ve got about 30. We put 15 songs on the album because I’m so old I was terrified I’d die before I’d get a record out. So it’s 15 songs but only 55 minutes so they’re not huge songs. The central core I suppose is country, a weird juxtaposition, a beginning and an end, some Blockheads type stuff.
Is it mainly songs from your live set?
Patrick: Yeah but we revived an old song called Elephant In The Room, which was one of the first songs I wrote, John did a really good job with it, it’s basically a country song but we’ve turned it into a Kevin Ayers type extravaganza.
John: Yeah, it’s quite dark, I was inspired by Ayer’s Song From The Bottom Of A Well which was one of my favourites when I was about 14. I love the guitar playing on it, that crazy, cranking guitar, just hitting it really. It’s an experiment I suppose but it came out quite well.
You say that a basic influence is country but while Charlie certainly fits that bill there’s some funk, Latin American grooves and noirish jazz on the album.
John: Yeah, every song’s been through about half a dozen different stages until we find a style that fits the song. We all listen to so much, we’ve been buying and listening to music from everywhere for a long time. It was quite funny when Chris was mastering the album and was trying to figure out which tags to put the songs under, we wanted to tick all of them.
Patrick: Yes, Loudon Wainwright maintains that his career was set back when someone said he was country and western so all his album were filed under that beside the likes of Sydney Divine.
The lyrics are quite striking, where do they come from?
Patrick: It never really follows a format I’m afraid. For example with Porky Dreams I came up with the name of the song (after some intense dreams one night) and just Googled American idioms and threaded them all together to make some sort of sense and to fit the sound of the G to G minor groove. Murdoch Browns also came with the sound of the original riff. It changed a bit over time and was written at the time News International was in the news a lot, I think it started from that phrase ‘Chipping Norton Set’. Elephant in the Room had a completely different tune originally but was written first and then the music came later. With Rose of Jericho I just wanted to write a story, a bit like Richard Thomson’s love story 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Millport Cowboy was written after a visit to Millport …and it was full of Cowboys!! Neilston was written after a rail journey to Neilston in the rain and I wanted to convey a bit of that repetitive rail sound. Music and words came together. I’m sorry I can’t come up with a consistent formula! Charlie was about a friend of mine who fell out of a fourth floor tenement window and about my dad who was in Normandy. I wanted to write a traditional country song in A. I suppose words and music came together.
I’ve got good musicians and good sound engineers here. I write the songs and then take them to John and he does the rest and then the song will have three or four incarnations with the band before it finally pops up. Some of them are really close to the original, for others it’s been a really long process.
John: Some of the songs on the album were recorded years ago, really just as quick demos so we’ve had to go back to them and repair things, modify them and such. Patrick’s singing has changed since we started recording
Patrick: What he means is its improved a lot. We even had a soviet era, songs about the KGB; I was reading a lot of Solzhenitsyn at the time.
John: Yeah, we had a Ukrainian friend come into do a voice over on that. It comes across like a Zappa thing but what she’s reciting is a recipe for chicken soup! She was really good at it and we said you’ve done this before, turns out she records the voice messages for Ukrainian passenger ships, the evacuation instructions and such.
Unfortunately, there’s no Ukrainian chicken soup on the album, perhaps the next one. In the meantime Porky Dreams is a sublime trip into Patrick Gillies’ fevered imagination, an imagination that comes to life on stage where he adopts an almost atavistic persona and again one is led back to mesmerising performers such as Dury and Beefheart as Gillies grimaces and gestures utilising props at times and inhabiting the songs as one possessed. Meanwhile Palmer, a superb guitarist, in fact one of Glasgow’s most guarded secrets, lets rip with style, panache and a deep love and knowledge of rock riffdom.
Blabber’n’Smoke will have a review of the album in the next few days and the launch is at The Glad Cafe on Saturday 22nd November where they will be supported by Edinburgh’s Kings Of Cheeze, details here.
Blue Rose Code/M. G. Boulter/Wrenne. The Glad Cafe, Glasgow. Wednesday 1st October.
Blabber’n’Smoke has to admit that it’s a bit of a latecomer to the music of Blue Rose Code, the vehicle for Edinburgh born Ross Wilson’s song poetry. A chance hearing of Boscombe Armistice on Celtic Music FM a few weeks ago stopped us in our tracks as this winsome pedal steel laced gem wafted from the speakers and Wilson’s Scots burr crooned about his granny saying he’d start a fight in an empty hoose. I suppose we’re much more used to hearing Scottish accents in songs these days with The Proclaimers leading the way while you wouldn’t contemplate King Creosote or Aidan Moffat adopting a transatlantic drawl. But there was more here, the song conjured up memories of Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece and even Astral Weeks with its haunting quality and impressionistic feel. In these instant internet days the album The Ballads of Peckham Rye was almost immediately summoned up and pretty much floored me. A magnificent trawl from Leith to London with side trips to the corner of the northern isles to the peak of the antipodes the album is a psychogeographic trip as Wilson summons up a mystic Celtic hinterland finely balanced by a couthy Scottishness that would be familiar to readers of The Broons. As for the music it inhabits that folk/jazz hybrid that Morrison invented on Astral Weeks along with nods to Jackie Leven and John Martyn, helped indeed by having the legendary Danny Thompson on double bass duties.
The Ballads Of Peckham Rye came out on CD a few months ago but this week was given a vinyl release and in tandem with this Wilson assembled a road troupe for a short tour. The show at The Glad Cafe was packed to the rafters and accordingly blisteringly hot, however the audience stalwarts were rewarded with a show that surely rates as one of the best of the year. A mini revue almost, both support acts were plucked from the Blue Rose Code line up with Wilson introducing them. First up was Wrenne, a singer he first encountered “playing a nylon strung guitar, barefoot, at a Secret Garden Party.” Singing songs from her forthcoming album along with a cover of Steven Merrit’s The Book Of Love her voice impressed, an opinion confirmed later as she sang some magnificent harmonies in the main set. Next up was M. G. Boulter, pedal steel gunslinger for the likes of Simone Felice when he’s in town. Boulter’s pedal steel graces The Ballads of Peckam Rye but he’s also a solo artist and a member of Southend’s The Lucky Strikes. His acoustic set saw him in a line of succession from Loudon Wainwright III and Alan Hull, bare boned songs that have a bleak yet hopeful outlook. Descriptive of Southend On Sea, chip shops, ice cream men (and their demise) featured but his best was the wonderful and evocative Once I Was from his fine album, The Water Or The Wave.
The stage was well set then for Blue Rose Code, tonight a five piece with Wilson at the front, Boulter on pedal steel and Dobro and Wrenne on harmony vocals along with Nico Bruce on double bass and Lyle Watt playing acoustic guitar and mandolin. From the off it was obvious that this was going to be something special. Rippling guitars introduced Silent Drums before Bruce’s bass burbled into action sucking the audience into the slipstream. Wrenne’s vocals slipped and slid around Wilson, recalling that other vocal duo Birds Of Chicago, as the band gently billowed like a fine wind pushing the ship forward with Lyle Watt’s guitar embroidering the sound. Wilson took us on a journey that went back to his childhood with Ghosts Of Leith via Edina up to his London travails on Whitechapel (where he slipped in a Drumchapel to some applause). Come The Springtime was described as a hope for the future and comes across as a magnificent update to what one might imagine to be a traditional Scots song. Norman McCaig’s poem, True Ways Of Knowing was acknowledged by Wilson as an example of his late flowering into the highways and byways of Scottish literature and it’s an excellent example of written poetry set to music, a feat repeated later in the encore.
Introducing Matthew Boulter earlier Wilson declared that he had always wanted some pedal steel on his records but later said that he was reluctant to participate in the Americana Music Awards as he “wasn’t country.” The Right To Be Happy was his attempt to write a country song and tonight it swung with a fine country heft while several other songs certainly cantered into a country trot. The Hibernian folk swing persisted through the night and culminated in the first encore with Wilson and Wrenne delivering a powerful rendition of Hugh McDiarmid’s poem Scotland. Finally the band came out to perform the excellent This Is Not A Love Song which allowed them to stretch out and improvise, recalling Soho folk blues such as Pentangle in their heyday although Wilson brought it back to earth with his couthy declaration ” time after time it’s the same old shite,” a wonderful mishmash of folk purity and Scottish bare faced cheek. Overall the impression was of a magnificent warm and enveloping wit and humanity with Wilson and his players producing the finest night of the year so far.
Southside Americana: The John Hinshelwood Band/Jack Law. The Glad Cafe. Sunday 29th June.
Hot weather and world cup football on the telly aren’t particularly conducive to promoting gig attendance. So a big hurrah to those who turned out to see some local musicians in the intimate surroundings of Shawlands’ Glad Cafe.
John Hinshelwood has just released his excellent third album, Lowering The Tone and tonight (accompanied by guitarist Tim Black and bassist Ed McGlone) was a welcome opportunity to hear many of the songs from the album live albeit in a stripped down fashion along with a few selections from his previous albums. The opening Dangerous Journey (from Shattered Pleasures) immediately introduced us to the care free relaxed seventies LA vibe that Hinshelwod captures so well with the acoustic guitars strumming us along a desert highway, a feeling that was maintained on Radio Angel and A Few Shallow Moments. The band took a side step into Western Swing, no mean feat for a three piece (with Hinshelwood lamenting the lack of a fiddler here) on Tell Me Something with Black delivering a blistering solo (despite Hinshelwood’s “not too fast” aside to him as they launched into the song). American Lifestyle is one of Lowering The Tone’s highlights and tonight it proved to be one of the highlights of the set. With Black on mandolin it recalled Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road in its stompalong country delivery with an edge and had the requisite clapping and foot stomping from the audience.
While guitarist Black had the opportunity to shine on several of the songs with his Ry Cooder like slippery tone excelling on the JJ Cale groove of No Hiding Place (mixing too many musical metaphors here I know) bassist McGlone was a rock, anchoring the band and perplexing the audience when he strapped on his Chapman Stick, a wondrous looking contraption that offered depth and a woody warmth to the bass playing on several of the songs. 
They had great fun duelling each other on the crowd-pleasing cover of Junior Brown’s My Wife Thinks You’re Dead whith Hinshelwood giving a fine deadpan delivery while the closing song, a cover of Smokey Robinson’s Tracks Of My Tears featured some very fine harmony vocals and a fine performance from Hinshelwood.
Support act Jack Law is a new name to Blabber’Smoke but it turns out he’s something of a veteran having been in a band called Greenmantle back in the seventies who appeared on a couple of occasions at the legendary Apollo. Now silver haired (and resembling Charlie Rich at times) Law has revived Greenmantle but tonight he was performing under his own name accompanied by Dougie Harrison on guitar and J.C. Dante on bass and mouth harp with the pair introduced by Law as “The No Spring Chickens.” Law’s roots in the past were evident from the opening when he offered a song written some years ago as a protest against the Iraq war. Powerful and polemic Law delivered it with gusto, veins a popping. He also railed against the Beeching cuts on Railroad Man, a bit late one might think but as he explained the railroad network has never recovered from this sixties butchery and the song itself was a fine railroad ballad with some neat slide guitar work from Harrison. There was more protest on As Any Fool Would Know which targeted the late and unlamented Maggie Thatcher recalling Lindisfarne in their heyday while the melody borrowed from Dylan’s You Ain’t Going Nowhere. Away from protest Law proved to be a fine writer with his paean to middle age romance, Heartache Ain’t For The Young a tremendous song with lyrics worthy of Loudon Wainwright III. With another country stomper delivered again on mandolin with some fine harp playing from J.C. on Old Glass Jar Law proved he still has plenty to deliver.
I think that Southside Americana is taking a summer break but Blabber’n’Smoke will post any news of forthcoming shows as they come in on the wire.
John Hinshelwood. Lowering The Tone.
John Hinshelwood is one of the stalwarts of Glasgow’s (and further afield) Americana scene although rarely does his name appear in lights. Performances, either solo or with his band or with The City Sinners seem to appear in fits and bursts although he does a regular slot at Tchai Ovna in the west end. Over the years he’s championed the memory of Gram Parsons with several tribute shows while his musical collaborators have included Rab Noakes and Gene Parsons while he’s supported Roger McGuinn (that’s three Byrds mentioned so far), Tim O’Brien and Martin Simpson.
Lowering The Tone is only his third album in a decade but as with its predecessors (Holler ‘Til Dawn and Shattered Pleasures) it’s an album informed by American country rock and folk circa the early seventies, reminiscent in turn of the latter day Byrds, Guy Clark, Jackson Browne and Poco (along with a host of others). The end result might not be cutting edge but its joi de vivre is infectious with Hinshelwood obviously enjoying himself while the quality of the band(s) he has assembled (all local including his regular live band, members of The City Sinners and a few other crack players) is at times astonishing with guitar players Tim Black and Iain Barbour both in spectacular form. The album was recorded in Glasgow’s Calton Studios but at times you would swear that this was a bunch of grizzled LA veterans sweating it out in Burbank.
Hinshelwood wrote (or co-wrote) nine of the eleven songs here and all are well above par. The opener Radio Angel starts off like an earnest singer songwriter strumming his wares but pretty soon Malcolm McMaster’s pedal steel swoops in as the song picks up pace. McMaster has a tremendous solo while Tim Black’s acoustic slide snakes away. With some very fine harmony vocals from Kathy Stewart the songs kick-starts the album in swell fashion. A fat backed pedal steel introduces the Western Swing styled I Don’t Want To Hear That and again McMaster delivers a fine solo that humbucks away while Black’s guitar is almost Hawaiian. Laid back and with an infectious groove that recalls Danny Adler’s Roogalator it’s a tremendous slice of music. Look Back In Anger is a story song of star crossed lovers that again features some superlative guitar over sumptuous jangled acoustics and swirling organ. What’s Left (Is what’s Right) is a swampy blues effort while A Few Shallow Moments has a Byrds like intro before Hinshelwood launches into a Gene Clark/Jackson Browne mode with a Beatles middle eight thrown in for good measure. Sometimes less is best and Hinshelwood delivers the excellent Little Rowdy accompanying himself on acoustic with Iain Barbour’s sympathetic lap steel the only colour added allowing his fine voice space to shine. Back to the full band and No Easy Way weighs in like a descendant of Gene Clark’s dense productions on No Other. Ed McGlone’s fretless bass throbs throughout like a lead instrument and reminds one of Joni Mitchell’s jazzier forays. The Cost of Doing Business is a cover of an old Pure Prairie League song and while it coasts along in a fine manner it suffers in comparison to the songs surrounding it. As if to prove this Hinshelwood next delivers one of the album highlights, American Lifestyle. A loose limbed Dobro driven road film synopsis it opens with a couple marrying in Mexico, feeding on hamburgers, French fries and milkshakes on their honeymoon as the rhythm section skiffles away and mandolin sparks against the Dobro. Excellent.
McGlone’s fretless bass reappears for the lengthy A Poet’s Life which is an impressionistic paean to Walt Whitman. Again Joni Mitchell and Gene Clark are recalled as the music curdles around Hinshelwood’s voice and ends with a fine coda. The album ends with a cover of Carole King’s Crying In The Rain with Patsy Seddon and Kathy Stewart adding their voices to Hinshelwood’s offering a version which is as shiveringly good as the Everlys.
Lowering The Tone is an excellent album which along with offerings from other bands such as The New Madrids and The Wynntown Marshals shows that Americana is alive and well in Scotland. There’s a chance to catch John Hinshelwood (and his band) as they are appearing at The Southside Americana Club at The Glad Cafe this Sunday while upcoming City Sinner dates are here.
Dan Stuart. Glad Cafe. Glasgow. Thursday 1st May.
This was a welcome return to Glasgow for one of our more perplexing musicians, Tucson raised and now domiciled in Mexico, Dan Stuart. Last time he played here the audience turnout was pitiful especially coming as it did only a few years after the sell out Green On red Reunion tour. Blame Stuart’s virtual retirement from the business or poor promotion. On this occasion however a packed venue bore testimony to Stuart’s once again rising profile and the sterling work done by promoter Kevin Morris’ The Fallen Angels Club who has astutely used social media and good old fashioned leafleting to ensure healthy turnouts for numerous shows around Glasgow.
With his last new release, The Deliverance of Marlowe Billings now two years old Stuart’s latest recorded offering was the release on Cadiz Music of two albums he recorded way back in the nineties, now repackaged as Arizona 1993-95. For the true fans (including one chap from Croatia) the lure, apart from the show itself, was an opportunity to buy two books written by Stuart. The Deliverance of Marlowe Billings is a warts and all snapshot of his early years (described as a false memoir) while Barcelona Blues is a collection of poems written while in the throes of a marital breakup which saw him decamp to Spain for a period of time. It’s clear Stuart has been in some dark places ( he’s recorded as saying his original intention when going to Mexico was to kill himself following a depressive episode, “my brain broke”) but tonight he seems in fine form, slightly combative on stage with a dismissive attitude towards much of his past works but engaging well with his foil and sparring partner for the evening, guitarist Antonio Gramentieri (from the Italian band, Sacri Couri) while at the end of the evening he was the perfect host patiently greeting the long queue that formed as he signed his CDs and books.
With Stuart singing and playing acoustic guitar and Gramentieri on electric it was a mesmerising show with deadpan humour, occasional menace and some soul baring. Ranging from the bruised tenderness of Why I Married You to the visceral shredding of Jimmy Boy the duo’s range was astounding with Gramentieri colouring in Stuart’s musical palette with bottleneck, reverb and barbed wire shards of noise on some of his solos. While there was a vulnerable air to Stuart as he revisited his darker times his wild and dangerous days of Green On Red were unveiled as he grimaced and roared on epic renditions of Jimmy Boy, That’s What Dreams Were Made For and Sixteen Ways while Clean White Sheets from the Marlowe Billings album had some blistering guitar from Gramentieri. There were several newer songs including Why I married You and the Hollywood Babylon like tale, The Day William Holden Died, which relates the solitary drunken death of Holden, star of The Wild Bunch with Stuart comparing his lifestyle to Holden’s. With the tour posters featuring Hemingway and Barcelona Blues not too far removed from Kerouac’s Book of Blues Stuart certainly relates to these doomed borrachos. His delivery of the Holden song was sublime and when, caught in the moment, he almost stumbled back over the stage riser behind him he quickly quipped “Bill just shoved me” as he recovered his balance.
Antonio Gramentieri was offered an opportunity mid set to play some of his and Sacri Cuori’s music reminding us of the superb soundscapes he can conjure up on six strings.Romantic with liquid notes flowing from his fingers it was all too short before Mr. Stuart came back to tell us a little about his book. Unfortunately there were no readings from the text but he did tantalise the audience talking about some misadventures in Edinburgh many moons ago involving spear guns in a hotel room (for more you’ll need to buy the book). Throughout the show there were humorous asides with the biggest laugh coming as he re tuned his guitar while telling us that Jim Dickinson, legendary Memphis producer thought that “tuning was a decadent practise of European homosexuals.”
Ending with a stomping Hair Of The Dog before an encore (and audience participation on) Little Things In Life we had almost two hours of Dan Stuart’s life given over to us and while it may be a bit melodramatic to say so there was a chance a few years ago that he thought he had no more time to offer. Here’s hoping that it’s not too long before we hear these new songs on a new disc. In the meantime the tour continues on the continent with another old Green On Red buddy, Chris Cacavas joining in some of the dates.
The opening act for the night was American songstress Kathleen Haskell. Ms. Haskell has a keen pedigree having sung with Neil Young while her latest album was produced by none other than Dan Stuart’s old sparring buddy, Chuck Prophet. Armed only with her guitar and a wicked way with some risqué rock’n’roll anecdotes she did a short set with the highlight being the title song of her album Where The Land Meets the Sky, a fine waltz time tune that recalled a chilled out Patsy Cline while the guitar coda was simple but captivating. Like A Pearl Necklace struggled to match the ribald introduction but I’ll Be Your Fool was a sensuous slink and, sitting at the piano for this one, Drama In The Dark proved to be a fine example of LA noir drama.
Dan Stuart/Marlowe Billings website
And here’s some video of Dan and Antonia earlier in the tour.