Friday 10th February 2023
Islington Assembly Hall, London, England
A pilgrimage, then. I’ve been fortunate, in the gigs I’ve attended in the last eight months – Sierra Ferrell, Charley Crockett and Nick Shoulders – that they’ve all been close to my home in the north-west of England. Since first discovering this alternative country music during lockdown, I’ve been determined to attend whatever gigs I could, but Tyler Childers’ UK tour consists of just a couple of dates down in London. At the back of my mind is the memory that I made no effort to attend a Tom Petty gig on the rare occasions he came to England, something I still regret deeply. When Petty died in 2017, I felt there would be no more great music for me to find. But though I wouldn’t be aware of it for another few years, Colter Wall had released his self-titled album a few months earlier, and Tyler Childers released the masterpiece that is Purgatory.
Determined to attend, and fresh off the disappointment of missing out on Billy Strings tickets when he came to Manchester in December, I attacked my F5 key during the pre-sale and managed to secure a ticket to the second date of Tyler’s two-day Islington residency. Still rueing the lack of effort I once made for the Tom Petty dates in similar circumstances, I take the train down from Manchester to London: two and a half hours through plain, unscenic country, and perhaps the only train journey you couldn’t write a song about.
Tyler comes on stage alone, to cheers from the 800+ people in tonight’s audience. He wears a blue denim jacket and a beanie hat and carries an acoustic guitar. While his band waits in the corridor backstage, he pulls a chair up to the microphone at centre-stage and throws his beanie hat to the floor, his closely-cropped ginger hair bleached by the shine of the venue’s spotlights. Perhaps appropriately for his solo segment, Tyler opens with the Hank Williams song ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’.
But it’s with his second song that the night truly begins. The opening lines of ‘Shake the Frost’, one of Tyler’s finest displays of lyricism, draws a roar of recognition from the crowd, who sing along to every word. It’s a special moment worthy of a special song. “And I love you like the mountains/Love the way the morning opens/To a soft and bright greeting from the sun.” The song ends to rapturous applause and Tyler grins. There’s a reason this show sold out in minutes: to hear Tyler Childers sing in that distinctive pained wail of his is a powerful experience, and he’s arguably the greatest songwriter of his generation. There hasn’t been poetry like this on a London stage since Bill Shakespeare was out here hustlin’.
Speaking of provincial artists who made their mark in London, Tyler sits and tells us how this mini-UK tour came about. When recording Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?, his most recent album – tonight is considered part of the Send in the Hounds tour, which truly kicks off in April back in the States – he thought it would be “pretty cool if we could roll some of the stuff through the plates at Abbey Road”. Due to Covid, this had to be done over Zoom, but Tyler thought it’d be cool if, “when we got the opportunity, if we could just go over and bum around a little bit and have a field trip”. This is his field trip now, and he thought, “well, shit… the whole entire band’s gonna be there, we might as well try to pick up some shows”. I don’t know how true this anecdote is, or if it’s just a bit of colour Tyler’s decided to add to the night, but it gives me a buzz. I’m as big a Beatles fan as I am a Tom Petty fan – I pondered for a whole three seconds before buying tonight’s concert poster, a psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine-inspired piece, from the merchandise counter at the entrance, and I spy a Höfner bass – the iconic ‘Beatles bass’ – on stage tonight. But if it gets played at any point tonight by Craig Burletic, Tyler’s bass player, I’m unaware of it. I’m in the front row, but on the opposite side of the room.
“I wrote this song for my lady,” Tyler says, before launching into ‘Lady May’, the tender love song written for his wife Senora May. The audience sings along from the start, as they do for the follow-up, the tear-jerker ‘Follow You to Virgie’. Ironically – or perhaps intentionally – when Tyler reaches the line “make sense of all these strings” in this second song, he hits a bum note and has to find his way back to the rhythm. He does, his acoustic guitar singing again, and it’s a fine end to his solo set.
A note here should also be made for Tommy Prine, who opened for Tyler tonight with a strong acoustic set of his own. Talented and affable, the son of John is just starting out and hasn’t yet released an album, but his single ‘Ships in the Harbor’ is a strong piece of songwriting and gets an enthusiastic reception from the crowd. Other highlights from his set include ‘Gandalf’ – “it’s kinda like when Gandalf came back all in white” – and ‘Cash/Carter Hills’, a wistful song about soaking up the magic in a special place.
But there’s no more special place than London tonight, as Tyler’s band the Food Stamps join him on the stage. They get themselves set up behind their instruments, and the anticipation in the crowd grows. As well it might, for with a wink to James Barker on pedal steel, Tyler launches into ‘I Swear (to God)’, a fan-favourite he’s not played live in years.
As the crowd sings along, the band introduce themselves through a series of solos – first Tyler and then C.J. Cain on guitars, then Jesse Wells on the fiddle, Chase Lewis on the keys and finally James Barker on the pedal steel. Only Craig Burletic on bass and Rod Elkins on drums don’t get a solo, but their rhythm section is keeping the whole thing together. It’s a cracking song, and the shouts from the audience are particularly lusty during the line “Fire in the hole!”
Tyler and the band follow up with another song from the Purgatory album, ‘Tattoos’. A beautiful song, kin to ‘Shake the Frost’ in its lyricism, this number quietly demonstrates one of Tyler Childers’ unsung qualities as an artist. His band can rock – as they will demonstrate later tonight – but what makes Tyler perennially country is the space he provides in his songs for some glorious pedal steel. Barker has the task of providing this dreamy sound to ‘Tattoos’ tonight, and provides it well.
After this one-two punch of songs from Purgatory, Tyler moves into left-field. Picking up a fiddle, he leads the band into a four-minute bluegrass instrumental. I don’t know what the song is – setlist.fm will later claim it is ‘Ways of the World’ – but it’s a good ‘un. Tyler’s fiddle dominates, but there are some nice touches from Barker’s pedal steel, and Craig Burletic’s bass solo fits the song well. As unusual as it is to witness one of music’s most magnetic vocalists commit to an instrumental, it’s a pleasant diversion.
We’re back to normal for the next number, the fun and wholesome ‘Country Squire’. It’s impossible not to bask in the humble goodness of this song, as Tyler sings of providing for his family by buying a caravan: “It’s a 24-foot-long vessel, measures eight feet wide… Hey! Hey! Hey! Woah!” This isn’t part of the song. “Hold up? What the fuck are you doing? Hey!” The song stops – Tyler’s seen something happening in the crowd to my far-left. “What the fuck is your problem? How old are you?” I crane my neck to see what the trouble is; from the balcony above, people lean over to look.
Send in the hounds. Security staff move into the crowd, though I can’t see anything happening from where I’m stood. Perhaps provoked by Tyler’s song about honest self-improvement and domestic bliss, it seems a fight has broken out. From the stage, Tyler says security should take “the dude in the orange probably, too, and the dude in the white”. There’s a murmuring in the crowd, and I try to transform my neck into Tyler’s 24-foot-long caravan to get a look. Someone takes the opportunity to shout for ‘Whitehouse Road’, not for the first time tonight – or the last.
“Everybody good?” Tyler says, to cheers from the 800+ members of the audience, now numbering a few less. He picks up from where he left off and finishes the incendiary song. It’s something to note on the set-list: ‘Country Squire (with Bellend Interlude)’.
The band are unfazed, soon finding their rhythm again with ‘Bus Route’, which steers into ‘Deadman’s Curve’. Perhaps deciding the rowdier members of the audience need some Jesus in their lives, Tyler puts down his guitar and launches into ‘Heart You’ve Been Tendin” and ‘Old Country Church’. The experimental gospel album Hounds has been divisive among Tyler’s fanbase, for a number of reasons not worth getting into here, but its songs sound great tonight.
The band begins the backbeat to ‘Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?’, but Tyler doesn’t immediately begin the song. Instead, he formally introduces the band to the audience – a long, colourful introduction with Tyler as a sort of circus ringleader. As each band member is introduced (“keeper of the keys, Mr Chase Lewis… the Professor, Jesse Wells”), they punctuate it with a piece of flair from their chosen instruments. But they’ve already introduced themselves with their playing tonight, and they stamp their mark on the night again with a fine version of ‘Hounds’, the slower album version rather than the up-tempo version Tyler has fired up at past concerts.
After ‘Hounds’ ends, Tyler picks up his fiddle again. While he tunes it up, some members of the audience shout out more song requests. ‘Whitehouse Road’ again, of course, which is a non-starter, but someone a bit more realistic shouts for ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’, which at least is something that Tyler still plays live. There’s no indication Tyler is going to bend to these hecklers, and nor should he. I’m already irritated by them, and I’m at my first Tyler Childers concert. He must be pig-sick of it. But it’s become a bit of a meme at this point, and perhaps there’s a subset of Tyler Childers fans who don’t consider the experience complete unless they’ve shouted for ‘Whitehouse Road’, the way ‘Free Bird’ was once shouted. But still, I’m a bit surprised that the behaviour has followed him to England, like an albatross around his neck. It’s not even one of his better songs.
Tyler’s response to the requests for old favourites is clear: another fiddle instrumental. Again, I don’t know what the song is – setlist.fm informs me it is ‘Cluck Old Hen’ – but it’s another fun digression. Tyler and the Professor Jesse Wells trade fiddles nicely, and there’s room for some screaming pedal steel from ‘Bloodbath’ Barker and some powerful drumming from Rod Elkins.
The next song is ‘Creeker’, and the audience sings along as Tyler, with no instrument, gestures with his hands. He sings of “the ways that the city can bring a country boy down”, and between the incessant requests for ‘Whitehouse Road’ and breaking up a fight, he’s been provided with a few more in London tonight. It’s a blessing that the vast majority of the audience is really digging the show, and roars with approval during this rare opportunity to see Tyler Childers live in England. Back on his acoustic guitar, Tyler follows ‘Creeker’ with ‘Born Again’, characterised by some great harmonies from Craig Burletic.
The good music, however, hasn’t stopped the shouts of ‘Whitehouse Road’ in between songs, and sometimes during them, as though perhaps the reason Tyler wasn’t singing it was because he just hadn’t been asked enough. To be fair, it seems to be the same few people, and I’ve heard it so often tonight that I’ve come to recognise the individual hecklers’ voices. A new one now joins the babble. “Whitehouse Road, Tyler?”, a chipper voice pipes up, as though helpfully reminding Tyler of the song. Perhaps he’d forgotten it in the thirty seconds since it was last called for. Have people not thought that perhaps the reason Tyler doesn’t perform the song anymore is that, the cost of living being what it is, it’s now impossible to get “higher than the grocery bill”?
Rather than the old, Tyler’s response is again to launch into a new song. It’s the unreleased ‘Percheron Mules’ which, with lines about “a hundred head of goat” and “picking dill”, proves to be a fun, oddball little country number. Tyler sings it with a smile on his face, trading grins with Barker on guitar. It reminds me of the Sixties rockabilly song ‘Haunted House’, at least until Craig Burletic and Rod Elkins come in with some delicious high harmonies on the line “compost that he needs”, sounding like a ghost or two has followed them from the Abbey Road studios. The harmonies are so good Tyler pauses for a moment in admiration. Naturally, someone takes the opportunity to shout for ‘Whitehouse Road’. Twice.
The next song up is ‘Way of the Triune God’, and unlike previous songs from the Hounds album, Tyler stands behind his acoustic guitar rather than gesturing with his hands. It’s a better look for him, a better feel, even if he’s not always strumming the guitar. But it must be hard to “WHITEHOUSE ROAD!” when someone is “WHITEHOUSE ROAD!” always sh–“WHITEHOUSE ROAD!”–outing for a certain song.
Everyone is too busy having fun to be derailed by these obnoxious few hecklers. The audience begins footstomping along with the opening chords of ‘House Fire’, a pulsating song that provides an opportunity for an intense display of musicianship from the Food Stamps. It’s a song made by Chase Lewis’ white-hot organ, but the others have license to display their chops: James Barker’s electric guitar, harmonies from the bass-drivin’ Craig Burletic, and fiddle from the bald, bespectacled Jesse Wells, looking every inch the Professor. At one point in the song, Tyler sits down on the chair he’d brought for his solo set, strumming his guitar and enjoying the performance from his band.
The tinderbox ‘House Fire’ leads straight into ‘Tulsa Turnaround’, a mid-tempo Kenny Rogers song turned into a hard-rockin’ number driven by Craig’s propulsive bass and Rod’s drums, that showcases Tyler’s tearing John Lennon-esque vocals. James Barker is particularly good, and with his wailing electric guitar, check shirt, thick beard and mop of hair, it’s like he’s stepped straight off a Skynyrd stage in the Seventies directly into 2023. By the end, a gleeful Tyler is bouncing on his heels at his band’s transformation into a stone-cold, red-hot 70s Southern rock band. These last ten minutes have been perhaps the best of the night.
After the fire, Tyler gives the instruments a chance to cool down. ‘Universal Sound’ is perhaps the hardest song of Tyler’s to recreate on a stage, but the band is able to capture its restful, spaced-out feel.
We’re reaching the end of the night, and there’s only a couple of numbers to go. Could it really be ‘Whitehouse Road’? Another aggressive shout for the song draws an immediate “Nope!” from Tyler, to laughs from the rest of the audience. He bobs his head from side to side; he’s determined to have fun and the cocaine song just doesn’t do that for him anymore.
Instead, it’s ‘Honky Tonk Flame’, and the fire the band kindled in ‘House Fire’ and ‘Tulsa Turnaround’ is reignited by a screaming pedal steel solo from Barker and some powerful rock drums from Rod Elkins. Tyler says there’ll be no encore – his voice can’t take it, he says – but he goes full-bore into the vocals for tonight’s final song.
It’s a cover of the Charlie Daniels song ‘Trudy’, and it allows for some fine guitar solo trade-offs between James Barker and Jesse Wells, to admiring smiles from the watching Tyler. Bloodbath and The Professor have been vying for top-dog status tonight, and I think Barker, well-named for the Hounds tour, has edged the battle. I don’t know if it’s just because of my penchant for pedal steel, but the West Virginian’s put everything into every song, alternating between pedal steel and electric guitar when the songs require. The entire band has shone, however, and in ‘Trudy’ we’re treated to an organ solo from Chase and then a bass solo from the ever-energetic Craig Burletic, bopping his huge mass of curly black hair. The song slows down and then speeds up to a fiery finish, drawing a whoop from Tyler. It ends with deserved roars of approval from the audience.
The band leaves the stage to applause. Tyler puts on his beanie and bows. As the crowd filters out, stereo music is played over the sound system. To my surprise, the song is ‘Breakdown’, followed by ‘Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’. Considering the failure to watch Tom Petty live was one of the things that motivated me to experience this show when I got the chance, it’s a remarkable moment of kismet. Quite unexpectedly, I find I have now – after a fashion – heard Tom Petty at a concert venue.
I find myself thinking about tonight’s increasingly rude heckling, and how we reached this almost memetic stage with ‘Whitehouse Road’. After hearing it shouted for God knows how many times tonight, between songs and even during songs, I’d be perfectly happy never to hear it again. I’ve quickly developed an aversion to it, and it’s no wonder that Tyler’s so dead-set against it; he must have it shouted at him at every gig.
But at the same time, I’d been rather hoping, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Tyler would’ve played ‘Feathered Indians’ tonight. I wouldn’t shout for it, and the lack of it hasn’t made the night any less special, but it’s my favourite song of his, and another one he regularly refuses to play live. This is a common point of discussion among his fanbase, with many speculating he won’t play the songs about drugs and drinking since he got sober, others that he won’t sing love songs that were written about women before he met his wife. But this is all bald speculation, and I find myself wondering if perhaps the reason we’ve reached the point where people can shout inanely for ‘Whitehouse Road’ at least a dozen times during a set is because Tyler is a bit too hidebound about playing his old songs, or at least in explaining why he won’t.
This comes to my mind as ‘Breakdown’ plays over the sound system. The last song Tom Petty ever played in concert before he passed was ‘American Girl’, his first hit from forty years earlier. Petty cultivated a fantastic relationship with his fanbase, and here’s what he had to say about playing the old songs, in a 2005 interview with American Songwriter magazine later reproduced in the book Conversations with Tom Petty:
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to play ‘American Girl’ anymore… But then maybe you’ll get two hours into the show, and the place is frenzied, and the vibe is so great, and the first couple chords of that song come on, and there’s such a rush of adrenaline throughout the building, that the next thing you know, you’re really digging playing ‘American Girl’. And I’ll feel, I can’t believe I’m digging this again, but I am.”
I don’t know what Tyler Childers’ full reasoning is for omitting certain fan-favourites from his repertoire. And regardless of what it might be, he certainly doesn’t deserve to be repeatedly dry-gulched by loud, arrogant shouts for ‘Whitehouse Road’. There’s been one particularly persistent heckler tonight, and I find myself wondering what that person’s reaction would have been if ‘Whitehouse Road’ had actually been performed tonight – I like to imagine they wouldn’t know what to do next.
I certainly can’t find fault with tonight’s show, and it’s been the best live show I’ve yet attended. Nor can I argue against the songs that have replaced old fan-favourites in the set-list: Tyler Childers continues to write and perform excellent songs. And yet, I can’t help but wonder how it would have felt if Tyler had strummed those acoustic chords that open ‘Feathered Indians’, and there had been that rush of adrenaline throughout the building that Tom Petty spoke of. Tyler’s got a taste of that tonight, smiling at the singalong recognition of ‘Shake the Frost’ and ‘I Swear (to God)’, but a song like ‘Feathered Indians’ would be something else entirely. Tyler never intended the song to become so big – it was never released as a single – but some songs just hit right, and its dreamy pedal steel guitar line can provide a transcendental bliss as much as any gospel song. I don’t doubt for one moment that ‘American Girl’ sounded incredible on that final night.
But it says a lot that Tyler Childers and his band can still provide the best live experience I’ve witnessed in spite of these petty misgivings of mine. The songwriting craft has been impeccable and Tyler’s voice an experience in itself. The band’s burned so hot at times I’m surprised the soles of their shoes didn’t melt onto the stage, and I’ll remember the footstomping to ‘House Fire’ and the singalong to ‘Shake the Frost’ every time I listen to those songs. The mini-tour in London is now over; I head back to Manchester, and Tyler and the band back to America. The fans over there have a firestorm heading their way, if only they’ll hold off on shouting ‘Whitehouse Road’ long enough to give it oxygen.
Setlist:
(all songs written by Tyler Childers, unless noted)
- I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (Hank Williams) (unreleased)
- Shake the Frost (from Live on Red Barn Radio)
- Lady May (from Purgatory)
- Follow You to Virgie (from Live on Red Barn Radio)
- I Swear (to God) (from Purgatory)
- Tattoos (from Purgatory)
- Ways of the World* (Traditional) (unreleased)
- Country Squire (from Country Squire)
- Bus Route (from Country Squire)
- Deadman’s Curve (from Live on Red Barn Radio)
- Heart You’ve Been Tendin’ (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
- Old Country Church (J. W. Vaughn) (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
- Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
- Cluck Old Hen* (Traditional) (unreleased)
- Creeker (from Country Squire)
- Born Again (from Purgatory)
- Percheron Mules (unreleased)
- Way of the Triune God (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
- House Fire (from Country Squire)
- Tulsa Turnaround (Alex Harvey/Larry Collins) (unreleased)
- Universal Sound (from Purgatory)
- Honky Tonk Flame (from Purgatory)
- Trudy (Charlie Daniels) (unreleased)
* according to setlist.fm
Recent Comments