The smell of whiskey burning

It's been a busy couple of weeks for live music, Thursday night was Steve Earle at the Irish Centre in Leeds. 


It galls me to report that the first time I saw Steve Earle was with Jim in 1987, when we were 19. I still have the ticket. That was before his (that's the artist, not Jim) jailing for heroin / crack / firearms offences, after which - for me - his songwriting really took off and he recorded a sequence of fantastically immediate records which mixed bluegrass, folk, country and psychedelia. In all honesty I have lost track of his recent albums but I was looking forward to seeing him play with a band for the first time since at Cambridge Corn Exchange which must have been about 10 years ago.


The Irish Centre is a terrific venue, intimate and atmospheric, and I was struck by the fact that Elaine and I were clearly younger than most of the audience - I guess the audience has aged with Mr Earle. He has a crack band with him at the moment, including a terrific guitar player called Chris Masterson , as well as his current wife (the uxorious Mr Earle has been married seven times), Alison Moorer.


It's odd - the first half dozen tunes were unfamiliar to me, presumably being drawn from the later albums, but after 30 minutes or so he played 'My Old Friend The Blues', which I found very moving for reasons which escape me right now. It's not a tune which has hitherto made me misty-eyed in any way, but something about it on Thursday made me come over all emotional. 


Friday night we scarfed a quick curry after work and beetled off to see Ewan McLennan, at the Grove in Leeds; apparently one of the oldest folk clubs in the country. The Grove is a perfect pub - a bit grubby, but very friendly and with fantastic beer. It has a warm fug of conviviality, and the atmosphere in the back room for the gig was very jovial. 


We booked Ewan for the Gate To Southwell Folk Festival three years ago, he was so good we invited him straight back; he's a terrific singer and a very good guitarist, he reminds me of Dick Gaughan. At a time when politically motivated singers and musicians are hard to find, Ewan is combining his own excellent songwriting with a refreshing choice of covers, whilst nailing his political colours to the mast in a way that few of his contemporaries seem to be doing. More power to him.

Reformation, Post TLC

Mere days after attending the worst gig of the year at the hands of The Fall, last night we witnessed the same band perform indisputably the best gig of the year, at York Fibbers.


Where Wednesday's incarnation was drunkenly shambolic and horribly off the pace, last night was focused, punchy, and thrilling. It is doubtless infuriating that Mark E Smith can turn himself on and off at the cost of his loyal audience's goodwill and patience, but last night The Fall delivered a breathless set of driving garage rock which gripped from the start.

Having been let down so miserably in Leeds earlier in the week, expectations were admittedly low but it would have counted as a terrific gig whatever the preconceptions. Reformation was a particular standout but there were also ripping versions of Nate, Psykick Dancehall, and Strychnine.

Prog, Strangeness and Charm

I've been buying up quite a bit of old vinyl this year, mostly from the splendid market at Tynemouth station, where there are usually a couple of record stalls worthy of a good browse. Cheap too, £3-4 usually for a reasonably well looked after LP. I've picked up copies of albums by Kate Bush, Frank Zappa, Yes, Genesis, Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, Jelly Roll Morton, and best of all Alex Glasgow. Should have perhaps anticipated that, being in the North East. There were a lot of old Lindisfarne and Tygers of Pan Tang albums too, if anyone's interested...

Anyway, it did strike me as ironic that a couple of these LPs were replacements for copies which I had owned and then ditched or sold as a stupid and callow youth. During a gradual period of musical revisionism, I persuaded myself to disown certain records by artists of the Prog Rock genre - which I am now busily reacquiring in Oxfam shops and market stalls across the land. There were a few records I hung onto during this musical Night Of The Long Knives - all my Pink Floyd stuff, a couple of Jethro Tull albums, and the Genesis live album from 1973. Other works by ELP, Marillion, Yes etc were handed over in a shame faced fashion to those arbiters of musical coolness on the counter at Selectadisc, where they were exchanged for a few quid to be spent on whatever C86 release was out that week.

It's not only vinyl copies of these previously rejected records which I have been buying again; I recently ordered from Amazon a double expanded CD of Hawkwind's marvellous Space Ritual. It's terrific stuff, maybe you have to be in the mood, but they were doing very similar things to German groups who became far more feted than themselves, in the cosmic / space rock genre. Or indeed Spacemen 3, who came a few years later and did a similar churning two chord drone with obvious debt to Hawkwind. I saw them at Hull Adelphi in the late 80's and a remember thinking 'hang on, these are just like Hawkwind!'

It's a truth universally acknowledged, in this house anyway, that a lot of the prog bands were huge influences on punk. Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Yes, and some of the more angular underground stuff too. Then there's the prog / folk crossover which is all sorts of cool these days but has been found to be equally risible down the ages; Comus and Roy Harper spring to mind, along with anyone who thought it was a good idea to keep playing for longer than three and a half minutes and to tinker with song structure, arrangement and instrumentation and lyrical influence.

I haven't undergone a wholesale rehabilitation; I'm not about to put aside three hours to listen to an ELP box set, or to make an apology for Tales From Topographic Oceans, but I have enjoyed revisiting a lot of this kind of stuff recently, with the benefit of a few years distance from the indie Year Zero when I turned my back on almost all of it. In a year when King Crimson have turned up in sample form on a Kanye West record and been covered by The Unthanks, maybe the prog rehabilitation is complete.

Paranoia Man In Cheap Shit Room

I took myself to see The Fall last night, in a basement venue within the student union at Leeds University. I have been to gigs on my own before, once in 1984 to see Marillion, and once in the 90's to see Dick Gaughan, but this was the first time for a good while.

Last time out, only 18 months ago, The Fall were serviceable: not a classic night, but they were OK, entertaining. The two occasions before that they were terrific - mesmerising even. Loud, repetitious, exciting. Last night was a far less edifying spectacle, Smith appearing to be completely pissed and barely capable of grasping the mic stand. The current band is tight and energetic, and reports of the new 'Ersatz GB' album are largely enthusiastic. A pity then that the live performance last night was so depressingly shambolic.

Still, Jamesie and I are off to York to see them on Saturday night, so maybe we will witness something different again.