I spotted two themes tonight: firstly, there were no drum kits (nothing gets past Oxfordbands.com reviewers!) and secondly, all four acts were using stage names or at least causing some trouble for your reviewer when trying to get their monikers right.
For example, the brilliant singer-songwriter, James Bell is also known as James Baldwin, who happens to be the brother of the Evenings’ Mark Wilden. I’ve had entertaining half-hours discussing with friends which of the siblings is the more talented; it always ends up as an honourable draw. James’ set was a winning combination of playfulness (his impersonation of George Formby covering Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ was a hoot) and wry self-appraisal, as on the ingenious ‘Emotional Phases’. The song exemplifies his mastery of the acoustic guitar; displaying a style both baroque but timeless, with the intro in particular sounding like soundtrack music to a Wes Anderson film. His lyrics are educated, sane and shot through with a self-deprecating humour which tends to banish angst, although he writes about love with a bemused detachment, which I find terrifying.
Humour of a different sort was displayed by Charlie Khan, a self-confessed ‘misanthropic bastard’, and by his gorgeous but plastered girlfriend who editorialised this down to the single descriptor, ‘c**t’. The promoters had apparently confused him with a Chinese-American detective, so perhaps his air of aggressivity was justified. Still, his lyrics are among the nastiest I’ve heard (at least until yesterday, when a friend played me Plan B); like the humour of Chris Morris, they seem designed to hurt:
‘ There’s nothing quite so pathetic as a whore who’s long since past her prime… I know it’s cruel but I almost always laugh at those felled by their own hand’
Musically, Khan’s group is intriguing and appropriate (he plays guitar, alongside a trumpeter and a bloke hitting a suitcase). Like The Peanut Albinos, reviewed last month, they exhibit an air of jazzy destitution, moral as well as economical. Although my guess is that Khan is actually a bit of a softy at heart: he runs an independent record label in 2008, for Heaven’s sake, so there must be an incurable optimist lurking under that sneering carapace.
A more enjoyable trio then took the stage, under the banner of Desmond Chancer and the Long Memories (scheduled for the Oxford Punt in April). Desmond is actually former Big Speakers rapper Tomohawk, but in this outfit he eschews the motor-mouth brilliance and gives us thirty minutes of basso-profondo croon, backed by Oliver Shaw’s (sorry Junkfood Jones’) cocktail-lounge jazz piano alongside the glamorous Anna Soprano’s violin and breathy back-up vocals. The songs offer no concession to modernity, which may be no bad thing; the success of Vince Vincent and the Villains suggests that music that could have been performed wholesale fifty years ago can still do well today. The Long Memories’ musical era is perhaps the thirties (one or two of the tunes remind me of ‘Buddy, can you Spare a Dime?), although Chancer’s vocal emotionalism may be closer to the forties and fifties. His favourite subjects are staples of old country music:mistreatment by women, mistreatment of the bottle, and so recall the doleful Hank Williams, but Chancer’s exuberance and bonhomie banish the maudlin; it’s almost as if his inexhaustible Falstaffian cheer is fighting with the gloom of his chosen subject matter- this creates a strange, laddish cabaret that is partly awkward and partly compelling.
The only compulsion I felt when listening to Francis Pugh & The Whisky Singers was to fuck off right sharpish. A downbeat, downhome country act, apparently all their songs are about drinking whisky. That I cannot believe, as the half-hearted, almost forlorn performance suggested something much milder; root beer perhaps, or Ribena. A trio of guitars with a pedal-steel occasionally thrown in felt like overkill and under-strength simultaneously, and the mumbling, nervous singer was dreadful. The best moment occurred half-way in, when the steel guitar meshed with a decent trumpet line performed by the harmonica player. An unusal combination, it created the impression of a novel sound-world for a minute or two, before the set lapsed back into plodding inconsequentiality.
By Colin MacKinnon
