“I’m a big Goth. I love ghost stories,” Toria Wooff says from the stage, to the surprise of nobody present. With her raven-black hair and bride-white laced blouse, she already looks as though she has stepped through time, down from the Lancashire moors which overlook her hometown of Horwich.
Toria is about to launch into her own ghost story, the haunting self-penned folk song ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’. But before she does, she has borrowed another ghost story she wishes to tell us, that she heard up in Scotland.
The Piper and the Dog is a story of Edinburgh Castle. Hundreds of years ago, a tunnel was discovered near the castle dungeons, and while it appeared to travel all down the Royal Mile underneath the city, nobody knew exactly where it went. The townsfolk sent down a brave piper to explore, and his dog followed him. Up above, the townsfolk could hear the man’s pipes as he played and so could follow where he went.
At some point the sound of the pipes ended suddenly, as though stopped by an external hand. In telling the story, Toria does not evoke the name of Great Hand, the spirit that is said to dwell in these accursed underground paths. Perhaps it is just as well, on a night where 66 souls have packed into a close, dark underground basement of their own to hear her vocal pipes play. But she does tell us that the piper was never found. And that when the dog made its way out, the townsfolk found its hair singed as though by flame.
The basement on Charles Street in Manchester does not appear to have any ghosts of its own, none apparently having passed over with the lease in 2018, when this antiques warehouse built in 1912 was converted into a music, food and events venue. But it is a worthy setting regardless for Toria Wooff’s haunting brand of Gothic folk. After descending the steps to the basement, I am enveloped by its thick darkness. With the exception of the red lights of the stage, the prevailing light comes from dim orange conches scattered around the room.
My own discovery of this artist came not from dungeons, but has proved just as fascinating to explore. Just a few short weeks after first hearing her name (pronounced like “roof”) and deciding to listen to her sole, self-titled album many times over, I am here listening to the whole thing played live. I marvel not only at the swelling power of her vocals, which are as immaculate as they are on the record, but at how quickly these songs have become familiar to me. The bones of the songs are strong, and in Toria’s performance she fills them with body.
It is a night of bones, for the six-song set of the opening act also proves strong. Appropriately enough, there is in this basement a Creepy Crawly, the stage name of Rachel Cawley. One of the things I find so rewarding on nights like this is the opportunity to take a chance on new music and have that vindicated; to not only experience a talented local-born artist like Toria Wooff take flight, so soon after discovering her name, but to hear emerging talent like Rachel’s.
Backed by Tom Latham on electric guitar, Rachel sits at her keys and sings a compelling set of deep and meaningful songs, including ‘Afraid to Fail’, ‘Slowly Goes the River’ (“a song lamenting the linear passage of time,” she says) and ‘December ’88’, a song which becomes even more profound when you learn the story behind it. This is true art. Rachel ends by picking up a banjo, warning that this “could go badly”. However, ‘All the Stars in the Sky’ proves anything but. A banjo on a strong-boned song is a memorable feeling, and I’m sure I’m not the only new fan Rachel has acquired from the basement tonight.
But the night truly belongs to Toria. She shapes it to her will. Backed by her friend Polly Virr on cello, a resonant instrument that fills the room and swells our hearts, she performs the entirety of her remarkable album in sequential order, as well as a trio of unreleased songs neatly placed between what would be ‘side A’ and ‘side B’.
With such a concise setlist, it is hard to pick out moments and the magic of the night can only be recalled in its grand sweep of melody and feeling. Some songs stand out, of course. The crowd-favourite ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’. The tender ‘That’s What Falling in Love Will Do’. The new songs which tantalise us with evidence that Toria’s incipient flight may prove to be broad and lasting. And then there’s the stunning and mature ‘See Things Through’, a song that burns slowly and doesn’t seem like it’s going to knock you over until you realise you’re already on your arse.
In between songs, Toria morphs from ethereal song-bride into pure Lancashire lass, grinning and telling deliberately crap jokes and connecting with people in the crowd over the Susan Hill novel The Woman in Black, which inspired her ‘House on the Hill’ song tonight. While on paper such things may seem to risk dispelling the delicate, haunting tone of Toria’s music, in reality it does not. Such moments earth her, allow us to recognise her as genuine, and make it all the more remarkable when after a laugh she picks on the strings of her guitar again and casts another spell.
There is a sense of everything being correct, of this being one of those nights of live music where everything falls into place and it is remembered: the pure, soaring voice which seems to have carried down from the Wilderswood moor; the confident folk picking on Toria’s acoustic guitar; the times when Polly’s cello bursts with a violently beautiful sound at the optimal moment of a song’s release, as in ‘The Flood’ – a concoction of timing and beauty and flowering expression that together makes the experience as a whole truly special.
It is Toria’s biggest gig of the tour, and while the 60-plus people who have filled the Yes Basement may not seem like a large number in the scheme of things, the enthusiasm and the energy of the fans here – and the same from Toria in response – have made it seem like 600. The basement has heaved like a living thing, and while Great Hand himself may not be here to silence the music, when Toria chooses to end it herself she receives her own great hand of applause. As the crowd slowly filters out, I think of us as pipers who, having descended, have heard such music in the dark that we have no wish to return to the surface. But in the dissipating magic of the basement, I morph reluctantly from the piper into the dog who is marked by his experience. I walk up the stairs and out onto Charles Street, a light rain falling in the night to soothe my singed skin.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)
The Lodge, The Deaf Institute, Manchester, England
“Thank you for being here instead of going to see Bruce Springsteen,” Esther Rose says from the stage after finishing her song ‘Chet Baker’ about halfway through her set. While Esther plays in front of a group of about thirty people here at The Deaf Institute, across town the Boss is performing his third and final Manchester concert in a week in front of a crowd of more than twenty thousand.
For my part, I can only take a half-credit of Esther’s gratitude. I’d already seen Bruce live on Saturday for his second Manchester salvo, and had finished writing my review of the night in the hours before this next gig, hitting the ‘publish’ button just before I headed out to the Deaf Institute. From Born to Run to Safe to Run.
‘Chet Baker’ is one of only two songs from Esther’s Safe to Run album to be played tonight, but it’s a fitting one for the start of my review. A chance encounter with the song on an Instagram story a couple of years ago introduced me to Esther’s music and immediately had me hooked. After illness prevented me from seeing her live when she came to Manchester in September last year, I was determined tonight would be different, particularly as she is riding high from the release of her new album Want just a few weeks ago.
Perhaps because of that recent triumph, Esther Rose seems comfortable tonight in returning to her origins, opening her set with two songs from her debut album This Time Last Night, ‘Wanton Way of Loving’ and ‘Jump Down Baby’. Both songs show that the catchy melodies of Want are not new developments; Esther has had this gift for years. Perched atop her stool, smiling and singing happily, Esther attempts to ignite a singalong on her opening number. “Everybody!” she yells, somewhat ambitiously. “Somebody!” No takers. “Anybody!” she laughs.
The crowd laughs also; we recognise that we’re not quite doing our part. It’s not that the audience is bad, or unwelcoming. Perhaps there’s a culture clash, with Esther’s sunny and vibrant American presence outmatching her more inhibited – or repressed – British audience. Perhaps it’s the lights; certainly, Esther believes so, and she asks for the room’s lights to be lowered, improving the ambience and encouraging those who are shy to feel a little looser. Or perhaps the reason is just the small number of people in the crowd, each person expecting someone else will be the one to whoop or holler or dance; the musical equivalent of the bystander effect.
It’s a challenge also faced by Hannah Ashcroft, the opening act tonight. Stood solo behind an electric guitar, which gives her music a funky edge, Hannah meets a disparate audience of perhaps 17 or 18 people with a six-song sequence of bended guitar licks and hooks, starting and ending strongly with ‘Under the Static’ and ‘Amoeba’ respectively. Tuning her guitar in between songs, Hannah fills the silence by mentioning her friend bought her a capo because she takes too long to tune. “I lost it,” she says, “so here we are!” Her catchy pop-tinged music is a fine warm-up for Esther’s own brand – if I am allowed to appropriate her lyric from ‘Shadow’, they are from the “same book, different page”.
By the time Esther takes the stage, the number in the crowd has peaked at around thirty. Whatever the reason may be for our inhibition, Esther is undaunted, conveying a warm and gracious presence throughout and making this small gathering feel like the most important group in the world. Even when she asks a photographer to stop taking pictures – they’ve been using a mechanical shutter, and its percussive snapping has become distracting – there’s no thorn on this Rose. “There’s not gonna be much change up here,” she tells the budding paparazzo softly from behind her sunburst acoustic guitar, her platform-booted legs crossed in a pose she will maintain all night.
I don’t exempt myself from criticism here. I hang back in the crowd at every gig I attend, and I couldn’t be any more of a wallflower tonight if I was singing ‘Sixth Avenue Heartache’. But I’m keen and grateful to be here tonight, even if I don’t broadcast the fact. When Esther says, with a playfully exaggerated vulnerability, “crowd participation is optional – but I’m up here all alone,” I feel a bit guilty. When she says that if there’s any song we want her to sing, then shout it out, I am tempted to overcome my usual inhibitions and holler for ‘Handyman’. But I don’t. (And she sings it later anyway, towards the end of her set, so there’s no regrets.)
But what I do realise as Esther pursues her set is that artists don’t need encouragement in order to express themselves, even if they dearly value and are grateful for it. Every artist at some point commits to their art in the face of indifference, entropy and personal limitations – even Bruce Springsteen, who probably has twenty thousand people waving in sync to ‘Bobby Jean’ at this very moment. Roses need no hands to bloom; Esther Rose can blossom even if those of us in the room are faithless gardeners and do not always tend to her.
It means I can listen with a sort of reverence as Esther navigates her way through a fine set of songs, including eight from the glittering Want. She name-checks musical friends like Dean Johnson before singing ‘Scars’ and Bella White before ‘Chet Baker’ (“this song is about Bella, though when I wrote it I thought it was written for my younger self”). She hands out a postcard to be passed around the room, on which she drew a conceptual map of how some of her new songs link together. (Somebody must pocket it or post it to China, because it never reaches my side of the room. Later, I will buy one from the merchandise stand.)
Esther sings so crisply her high voice almost breaks on ‘Tailspin’ – “just love me”, she sings – and again on the titular ‘Want’, her “elder millennial anthem” which closes her set. This commitment deserves a reward, and by the end of the night she has received the singalong she has been seeking since her opening song, turning musical director to co-ordinate the audience in the singing of “got to let it go” on ‘Spider’. It’s endearing to see how much this small victory means to her in her smile.
“I don’t like those big shows,” Esther had said earlier tonight, after thanking us for being here with her instead of with Bruce Springsteen. “I’d much rather be here, listening to some unknown singer-songwriter.” It’s a sentiment she expands upon later, shortly before debuting a new song inspired by Joni Mitchell. She’s been reading the book Traveling by Ann Powers – it’s a biography of Joni – and her newly-penned song, delivered with Joni-like vocal patterns, feels hot out of the oven, with a line about her “travelling companion still at the wheel”.
In the book, Esther says, Joni was quoted as saying her ideal audience is 30 to 40 people. “This is someone who could be headlining with Bruce Springsteen,” Esther remarks with awe, and while she herself is competing with the Boss for Manchester’s attention tonight rather than sharing it, the implication is clear. Esther feels grateful for playing for her ideal audience. She loves to tour, she says, because living in the moment is what it’s all about. Her performance tonight shows that the philosophy of an artist, the perspective from which they approach their work, the gratitude they show for an opportunity to let even a few dozen hear it, are more profound signs of artistic success than any box-office head count. A life on the road can be a life lived well. In Manchester tonight there are two lights shining.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Want and written by Esther Rose, unless noted)
Wanton Way of Loving (from This Time Last Night)
Jump Down Baby (from This Time Last Night)
Don’t Blame it on the Moon (from You Made it This Far)
Tailspin (Esther Rose/Ross Farbe)
Heather (from the Rough Trade Exclusive version of Want)
As I approach the doors of the Co-Op Live arena to scan my ticket, my ears catch the soaring guitars of ‘Learning to Fly’ playing over the venue’s speakers. I’m always buoyed when I hear a Tom Petty song in a concert hall – before this evening, it has happened at twoTyler Childers gigs – because it reminds me of why I decide to be here experiencing such events. A big fan of Petty, I had never seen his band live and, after his sudden death, I realised with a pang that I never would. It made me resolve to never again pass up an opportunity to hear the music I love, and in recent years I have been privileged to witness the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and now Bruce Springsteen live on a stage, as well as exploring a wealth of music from a burgeoning country and roots scene, a cast of young unknowns and future greats including the afore-mentioned Childers. All of this comes to my mind as Mike Campbell’s slide guitar solo plays over the speakers. I look up with a smile as a white gull glides through a cloudless blue sky.
This is how I had intended to write my review; a mere narrative of the night, its sights and sounds and feel recorded for posterity, even if only for myself. But the Boss has spoken. Days earlier, Bruce Springsteen had taken to the same stage in Manchester and delivered a planned speech attacking Donald Trump, warning against authoritarianism and charging the President with an assault on civil liberties in America. It’s a speech he will deliver again before his set tonight.
The speech made headline news – and drew a rebuke from President Trump, who labelled Bruce “a dried out prune of a rocker” who “ought to keep his mouth shut”. Consequently, the shadow of Trump looms over this second night. It means that, even as I queue outside the Co-Op Live for Round Two, the story continues to swirl. Will the Boss double down? Will Trump respond again? It means, on a purely selfish note, that I feel slightly peeved at having missed that first historic night simply because I chose the second of Springsteen’s three dates in the city, like a man who walks past 3 Savile Row just as the Beatles are packing up from their rooftop concert. And a devil in me also ensures it means that, when I am at the merchandise stand buying a tour t-shirt, I feel compelled to pick out the orange one.
In a way, it’s a shame that the political overshadows this night of music, for the E Street Band prove to be on great form. Nils Lofgren tears it up with some deliciously dirty guitar soloes and spins around like a man a quarter of his age, drawing many a roar from the crowd. Max Weinberg booms tirelessly on drums. And Jake Clemons proves the boots of the Big Man are not too big to fill, delivering those stirring saxophone notes which take Springsteen’s songs to another level entirely.
This night, then, can be seen as a meditation on power: the political power that Bruce explicitly targets in between songs, but also on the power of music to overcome and transcend differences. When the Boss speaks at the start of the night, it’s not solely a political statement – though it is very much that – but a statement on the value of “rock and roll in dangerous times”.
I must confess: I have an instinctive suspicion of musicians getting political. While I’m not of the opinion that artists should “just shut up and sing”, which has been a charge thrown at Bruce from some quarters since his on-stage statement a few days ago, I do sometimes resent having to work harder to separate the art from the artist. Political statements from artists are not always perceptive, are often simplistic, and at their worst can be opportunistic or self-aggrandising. Reacting to or commenting on those statements, whether for or against, gets you on the radar of some very tedious people, particularly in our social media age, and dragged into exhausting arguments with those who treat ad hominems, non sequiturs and logical fallacies like old friends to be welcomed to dine at table. Online politics is a pit of vipers, and if you fall in you get bit by fangs on all sides.
This is not a charge I lay against Bruce Springsteen, to be clear. His statements are not simplistic or lacking in perception; they show nuance and clarity, even though I find myself surprisingly cold at some of the broader sweeps of his brush. The Boss has always been political in his art, even if tonight feels especially politically-charged, and it’s an essential component of his lyrical content. What is more, there is a noble and unrepentant strain of political protest in the roots of the Irish and American folk music that Springsteen draws water from. Far be it from me to stifle what shoots may choose to grow from that well.
But I do find myself wishing I was sailing into my first Bruce Springsteen concert on calmer waters. Because now, instead of commenting on how fun it is to hear ‘Hungry Heart’ from the stage, or ‘Badlands’, or ‘Born to Run’, I find myself having to get my political ducks in a row. I can’t enjoy ‘Bobby Jean’ or ‘Dancing in the Dark’ to the full, or look back on them with fondness, until I square this circle of how I feel about the intersection of art and politics on Bruce’s stage.
I’m not a professional Trump-hater – certainly, I don’t make it part of my online identity. Nevertheless, I do feel deeply sick about the treatment of Ukraine, and President Zelensky, not least by the toadying Vance. And speaking as we are of power, I recognise the latent power that Trump has ridden to political victory, born out of things ignored until they evolved into something that could no longer be ignored, and I lament that they were suppressed so long that this seemed their only outlet.
I once read something attributed to Phillips Brooks which said that when America names its man, it names Lincoln. As a lover of America and its roll call of great men – not only Lincoln but the diverse talents and character of the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Dick Winters, Ed Murrow and Tom Petty – I find it passingly sad that, twice in the last eight years, America has named Donald J. Trump its man, for want of any better. Bruce Springsteen seems to be struggling to process this more than myself, if his bowed head on stage or his fierce and frustrated guitar solo on ‘Rainmaker’ are any indication. And yet, because Springsteen has posed the question, it leads one to remember that he himself campaigned most recently for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris to be America’s advocate. Without getting into a political debate over the merits and demerits of that duo, most would surely concede that they are not American politicians of the first rank.
The night of music having been prised open by a political crowbar, more thoughts come pouring through the gap. If Springsteen makes himself the lightning rod for this topic, one must ask the question of what he hopes to achieve. It would not take much work to show President Trump as vain, gluttonous and bullying in his office, but for all his trespasses I find myself nervous at how the words ‘dictator’ or ‘fascist’ are thrown around so readily (though note that Springsteen himself does not use the latter term in his speeches tonight). Partly this is because, having read extensively about the horrors committed by actual fascism in history, I need a higher bar to make that charge. But it is also because – unlike many, it seems – I remember the assassin’s bullet last year. For an artist on stage, branding your political opponent a dictator has the effect of making you appear an icon, a rebel, a folk hero, but to some of the crazies out there it has them crouching on a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, with a clear line of sight and millimetres away from starting a civil war.
One also wonders if Manchester is the best stage for this principled stance. We have our own fine history of political dissent, of course, but one wonders if Springsteen’s comments would not have been more impactful, and more courageous, if first voiced in an American city. While no doubt heartfelt, in Europe the speech has a sense of tilting at windmills, as though a bunch of soused Mancs on a Saturday could be inspired to march on Washington.
On a stage in England, one wonders if Bruce could have found other worthy concerns to lend his voice to, tailored to the moment, rather than issuing an open-ended call to arms against the latest anomaly in the American experiment. One wonders if he would speak against, or is even aware of, the circumstances of the very venue he plays tonight? The Co-Op Live arena is built on the Etihad campus and part-owned by the City Football Group, an umbrella company that has been accused of sports-washing and financial doping, and which remains an unrepentant actor in a trend that has taken a truly working-class sport and made success largely dependent on which emirate owns your community.
Or Bruce could have used his platform in England to show solidarity with the likes of Elton John and Paul McCartney, two peers who at this moment have placed their names (among many others) in opposition to the British government’s attempt to perpetrate a mass theft of copyrighted art. The disgraceful Data (Use and Access) Bill is being pushed through Parliament as we speak, and would involve asset-stripping the creative industries in order to feed corporate A.I. machine-learning which will, in turn, replace those artists. To use Bruce’s own phrase from one of tonight’s speeches, this is happening now. And what is more, it is something specific that can be targeted for change, and where another cultural icon’s name to the ranks would add great weight and encouragement – and expose the issue to his fans.
Such are the criticisms which can emerge, even among your fans and allies, when you stand on a soapbox. But I find that the more I reason this out, this nexus of politics and art that is so important to Springsteen, the more I am able to recognise his power. Art and story has a unique way of cutting through the bullshit, and as a storyteller Bruce has thought and written deeply about his country, saying he has “tried to be an ambassador for America for fifty years”.
It means that what we witness tonight is the framework of a tragedy. In Trump, perhaps we see what happens when the stories America tells itself meet reality, when the shining city on the hill finds itself under a blanket of fog. In many ways, the Trump administration’s crude realpolitik is not unusual in American history; it would not look out of place amongst Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial attempts, or the various treaties drafted with Native American tribes, treaties signed with the left hand while the right hand taketh away. In such a context, the current President sees no reason not to covet Greenland, or rename the Gulf of Mexico, nor to back Ukraine against naked military aggression unless it surrenders to him its mineral wealth.
To be fair, Springsteen has never been an uncritical cheerleader for the Republic; if anyone takes ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ for a blithely patriotic anthem, it’s because they aren’t listening to the lyrics. But herein lies the two aspects of the current tragedy. On one hand, you have an electorate which wants to make America great again, to bask in the glow of the story of American exceptionalism even while behaving less than exceptionally. On the other hand, you have men like Springsteen who have long channelled a nuanced and exhilarating image of America through rock and roll – that great American invention – who now find themselves with a creased brow and an ache in their voice as they insist that the America they wrote about is real. “It is real,” Bruce says, with emphasis, to the Manchester crowd.
And one wonderful thing about such difficult moments is that they are when artists dig deep and find their power. A Bruce Springsteen set is known for being energetic, but tonight feels especially potent. Almost the entire set is one anthem after another, delivered seemingly without pause for breath, beginning with ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ and ending hours later with Steven Van Zandt’s purple Rickenbacker ringing on ‘Chimes of Freedom’. The politically-sparked energy feeds into the other numbers; a fun and lively ‘Out in the Street’, a raucous ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Murder Incorporated’, to say nothing of that prime Clemons saxophone bursting through each and all of the greatest hits and making everyone here feel more than alive. Bruce often steps aside to allow the crowd to sing iconic lyrics, sometimes even entire verses. It’s a thrilling set delivered in overdrive by the E Street Band, and if the songwriting nuance is sometimes lost in the power, it’s a worthy riposte to outside events. The Boss makes a mockery of Trump’s remarks; this “dried out prune” has plenty of juice.
Even more remarkably, there are moments when the nuance is not lost in the fizzing energy of the Manchester thousands. ‘House of a Thousand Guitars’ is a rare quiet moment, delivered by Bruce alone on an acoustic guitar, and when he sings ‘Atlantic City’, the political context of the night seems to put extra feeling into the line “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” In the finest single moment of the night, Bruce draws goosebumps as he sings ‘Long Walk Home’:
My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town It's a beautiful place to be born It just wraps its arms around you Nobody crowds you, Nobody goes it alone. You know that flag flying over the courthouse Means certain things are set in stone Who we are, What we'll do, And what we won't."
In a pure moment like this one, an artist says more than my thousands of words of prose – more succinctly, and with a greater clarity. I’ve written on a number of occasions in my concert reviews of how I could not hope to communicate in words what these nights communicate in magical moments, often quoting Walter Pater’s line about how all art aspires to the condition of music. At the start of the night, the Boss had roared that “the mighty E Street Band is here tonight, to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times”. On many occasions tonight, he has shown how that power outmatches – it trumps, if you will – all other types of power, including the political.
Perhaps if all art aspires to the condition of music, all power aspires to it also. In Trump’s remarks there is something of envy. In the moment that Bruce Springsteen sings of that flag flying over the courthouse, nothing is more true or imperishable than the America he brings to mind.
Setlist:
(all songs written by Bruce Springsteen, unless noted)
Land of Hope and Dreams (from Wrecking Ball)
Death to My Hometown (from Wrecking Ball)
Lonesome Day (from The Rising)
Out in the Street (from The River)
Rainmaker (from Letter to You)
Atlantic City (from Nebraska)
The Promised Land (from Darkness on the Edge of Town)
Hungry Heart (from The River)
The River (from The River)
Youngstown (from The Ghost of Tom Joad)
Murder Incorporated (from Greatest Hits)
Long Walk Home (from Magic)
House of a Thousand Guitars (from Letter to You)
My City of Ruins (from The Rising)
Ghosts (from Letter to You)
Because the Night (Springsteen/Patti Smith) (from The Promise)
Human Touch (from Human Touch)
Wrecking Ball (from Wrecking Ball)
The Rising (from The Rising)
Badlands (from Darkness on the Edge of Town)
Thunder Road (from Born to Run)
Encore: Born in the U.S.A. (from Born in the U.S.A.)
Encore: Born to Run (from Born to Run)
Encore: Bobby Jean (from Born in the U.S.A.)
Encore: Dancing in the Dark (from Born in the U.S.A.)
Encore: Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (from Born to Run)
Encore: Chimes of Freedom (Bob Dylan) (from Chimes of Freedom)
Note: An official stream of tonight’s show will be available on Nugs.net here.
“Yes,” says Coleman Williams from the stage as he introduces the final song of a blistering set. “I am the firstborn of the fourth generation of the Hank Williams family. Do not ever make the mistake to tell me how to show respect and love to my family, because I would never disrespect you and tell you how to love your own.”
Known as ‘IV’ (Four) as a nod to his heritage, Coleman is making his final, successful, effort to address the elephant in the room. His Strange Band wait patiently behind him. One gets the sense they have heard this speech before, but to those of us in the crowd, on the first night of the band’s first ever UK tour, it is a revelation.
“Remember, the real importance sometimes about having family, and understanding where you come from, is NOT just to do something because you come from somewhere. It’s to be able to have the respect to understand you can do it your own way to show love to where you come from.
“My great-grandfather, who I have seen on a million bar stools and pictures and t-shirts, he died when he was 29, folks. I’m 35 years old. I am six years older than my great-grandfather. And that’s not fucking cool.
“Yes, the man was a legend. Yes, the man wrote great songs. He did not fucking O.D. like half those other dudes. He worked himself to death and died from exhaustion. He broke his spine at 27 and wasn’t even allowed to sit in a fucking chair, because the Opry said his job was to dance and sing. And they fucking killed him. And they won’t even give the man a statue, or give him credit, and he built the goddamn building.
“My father is a man named Hank the Third but his real name is Shelton Williams. That is his real name. And for a lot of people, they don’t know that about him, and that’s a big thing in my opinion. I wanted people to know my name. And it’s MY name. And the reason I think it’s so important to have my name is because I wouldn’t be worth shit if I stood up here and played for y’all just because I’m related to somebody in country music.”
One wonders if playing for the first time for a British audience, where the crowd speaks the same language but there is an ocean separating you from your family’s ghosts and your country’s expectations, has emboldened IV to loosen his tongue. At the Deaf Institute, we hear it all. What becomes clear, and increasingly remarkable, throughout the night is that this is no rant, no jeremiad, no polishing of the chip on one’s shoulder. Coleman doesn’t lean heavily on the Hank Williams legacy, but nor does he reject it. This isn’t a man refusing to reach for the crown, but a man refusing the notion that crowns should be bestowed by birthright. This is a man who has thought about his burden and learned how to bear it. And it’s because of this growth, this conceptual breakthrough Coleman made in his life, that we can experience a night of excellent original music with not a cheatin’ heart or a bucket with a hole in it in sight.
“Don’t ask me to play Hank songs,” Coleman says after tonight’s first number, “or I’ll make you look stupid.” It’s a warning, but also a self-fulfilling prophecy: anyone asking would automatically look stupid, because they’d be throwing away the chance to get some Strange, to hear some damn fine original IV songs before tonight’s 10 p.m. sound curfew. Most people would want Coleman to sing Hank songs, as some sort of jukebox tribute act, but then most people have no imagination. Most people aren’t willing to grant artists – any artist – the opportunity to show them something they might not have even realised they wanted. And those people would be missing out, if they had their way, because Coleman Williams has his own vision. IV and the Strange Band, while surrounded by ghosts, are their own beast.
Thirteen stops into their European tour, and smelling the blood of Englishmen for the first time, that beast is lean and eager to pounce. The band – Ethan “Big Frog” Salas on lead guitar, Hunter Mellish on bass, Alex Bizzarro on pedal steel and Hunter Edwards on drums – play IV up onto the stage, where he leads them into a new, unrecorded song. Lyrically strong and honky tonkin’, the song also announces Coleman’s independence. While he possesses that distinctive reedy tone in much of his singing, which works excellently to deliver his lyrics, IV is also capable of the heavy, ominous growl that delivers “I thought you knew” to tonight’s crowd.
The band follow this up with another unreleased song, rocking out on ‘E-450’, a song about the Ford “short bus” they use to tour America. It’s a straight-up country song cutting loose, and for all their versatility tonight the Strange Band also show they could be a damn fine cut-and-dry country band if they wanted to. Whether it’s the country blues of ‘Today’, the honky-tonk familiarity of ‘Drinking Sad’, or the pedal steel run on the Stonewall Jackson cover ‘Why I’m Walkin”, a fun and warm old-timer song, the Strange Band are perfectly willing and able to “pay what’s due”, as Coleman sings in the opening song. For a good chunk of this they can thank Alex Bizzarro, bearer of the finest handlebar moustache this side of the 1860s, whose pedal steel soars around the room. When IV tells his band to “make ’em cry, boys!” during ‘Drinking Sad’, it’s Bizzarro who can.
But where IV and the Strange Band really deliver is when, with practised ease, they clear a path through the swarm of country, punk, metal, rock and God knows what else they’re influenced by to deliver songs that are quintessentially Strange. “The most punk and metal shit’s been done by country boys,” Coleman says, introducing their third song of the night. ‘Son of Sin’ is the closest thing IV and the Strange Band have to a signature song, and it’s a heady rush of heavy metal crunch, booming drums and bracingly clear-eyed country lyrics.
It’s for songs like this we should be grateful Coleman managed to maintain the will to forge his own path, even after making peace with his family name. It’s not the only song in which they achieve this – ‘Inbred’, later in the set, is infused with a heavy chugging guitar sound, while the stop-start ‘Diddle’ manages to be both fun and foot-stomping, marrying straight-up country lyrics with a band that follows Big Frog’s lead guitar into a free Zeppelin-esque rock jam. There’s a synergy between the new and the traditional here; bona fide country with just enough punk and metal and general strangeness brought into the musical gene pool to keep it fresh and stop things getting, well, inbred.
“Part of the reason I make country music, folks,” Coleman explains, before introducing another genre-bender, a raucous country translation of the frantic hardcore punk song ‘Sailin’ On’ by Bad Brains, “is, well, when you grow up in a family where you’re told to do it, it makes you not want to fuckin’ do it. I was the first member of my family to have a degree. I taught high school till I was 25. I owned my own businesses till I was 30. I sold my businesses and funded my band without having to take money to sell my soul. And for almost six years now, I’ve done my country band. And I learned that mentality from punk rock. I learned it from DIY and alternative music.” To quote Waylon Jennings, old Hank didn’t do it this a-way, but I for one am sure glad IV did.
Happily, IV and the Strange Band aren’t alone in their quest to draw more looping spirals in the Venn diagram of country, punk, rock and metal. Opening for Coleman tonight, Mike West is a sort of musical soulmate to IV, blending melodic country-inspired songwriting with surprisingly versatile heavy-metal vocals. When I first saw Mike West take the stage a few years ago, opening for Nick Shoulders, for a half-minute I thought he was a roadie gone rogue. The large, bearded and long-haired Scouser, like Gregg Allman in a biker jacket, didn’t fit any image I had of a country singer, but the quality of his songs proved otherwise. I became an instant fan and his album, The Next Life, proved to be a work of art I still play regularly. Some months later, he opened for Mike and the Moonpies, who blew the lid off the place, and it had been West’s name on the bill which had been an important factor in my decision to go. In truth, it was also a motive for tonight with IV.
Tonight, Mike West is fronting his new band in only their second ever gig, and he’s delighted to be doing it in support of IV and the Strange Band. “I see what I do as bringing metal to country and country to metal,” he says, adding that when he started the band he played them videos of IV, including ‘Son of Sin’, “because I wanted to sound like that”. Adding Brian Dixon on drums to Rob Wakefield on fiddle (who also played with Mike at that Moonpies gig), Mike West and his band the Missing Links forge their own chain between the same disparate genres the Strange Band roam in.
Proving that IV’s music is not the only revelation tonight, the Missing Links give Mike’s songs the backing they deserve. ‘Mothman’, his signature song, which I’d previously heard solo and as a twosome with Rob on fiddle, finally breaks out of its chrysalis with the addition of Brian’s crashing drums, and reveals its full power live. The Missing Links add tempo to ‘Ballad of the White Collar Arsonist’, Mike’s “mass murder ballad”, and their opener, ‘Work On’, which I’d previously heard as a slice of Mersey delta blues, is heavier, punctuated by some dissonant fiddle touches from Rob Wakefield. The dreadlocked Rob, in his Alice Cooper ‘Poison’ shirt and camo pants, might look an incongruous part of a country outfit, but he’s Mike West’s not-so-secret weapon, emphasising the songwriter’s natural gift for melody in songs like ‘Mothman’ and helping songs like ‘Lonely Hill’, which has an exuberant Irish folk vibe, and ‘For Them’ soar.
The latter song is a special moment for me, as I had mentioned ‘For Them’ some days earlier when Mike put the word out on social media that there was a gap in his setlist and he was taking requests. Lyrically, the song is poetry, fulfilling the literary principles of ubi sunt which I am particularly fond of; a concept hard to define but a sort of rhetorical, enigmatic evoking of the joys of yesteryear, not so much nostalgia or longing but merely lamenting that such fine moments have passed. Introducing the song, Mike says he wrote it because he noticed so many songs out there were “love songs, about romantic love” and he wanted to write a song for his friends, including, he says, the members of the band now known as the Missing Links. When I meet Mike after his set, he smiles and confirms he put the song in there because I requested it. While it plays, with Rob’s gorgeous, soaring fiddle making the song almost anthemic, I look around the crowd and find myself pleased to have played a small role in having it heard.
Even allowing for my meddling, the Missing Links have provided a fine set and it’s an honour to hear the band come together. Not only the songs but Mike himself seems energised by having them at his back, singing ‘Away I Go’ with gusto and introducing ‘Goin’ to Hell’ by playfully pointing out the disturbing advertisement playing on repeat behind the bar. The Mona Lisa, her immortal form possessed by one of those cheap AI-driven face manipulators, is sipping Red Bull, and Mike cites it as evidence that everything is indeed going to hell.
What to do about this? Mike asks. Well, the next song is, pointedly, ‘How to Build a Guillotine’. A catchy song with witty lyrics, I first heard Mike sing this song at that Nick Shoulders gig two-and-a-half years ago and, as odd as it may seem for a song about the benefits of revolutionary carpentry, I suspect it has breakout potential. If it stays unreleased for much longer it will be a great crime, with West himself – who draws his finger across his neck theatrically on the line – deserving to “meet Robespierre’s end”.
Elsewhere, the trio have fun with a cover of the Eighties Dio hit ‘Rainbow in the Dark’. The song shows the flexibility unlocked for Mike in having a band to back him up, and this is confirmed by their final number, a gutsy version of ‘No Grave’. Showing that it’s not only IV who will be able to deliver thoughtful and eloquent perspectives to the audience, Mike says the song was written because he doesn’t like cemeteries; “I don’t need a stone in a field to honour someone. I’ll watch their favourite film, go to a night of live music like this one.” Capping off a set in which the Missing Links have forged a chain that deserves to capture many in the audience, ‘No Grave’ ends with the line “Remember me.” I hope many here in Manchester, and in London two nights hence, will indeed remember. (Fate – and two blown van tyres – will conspire to prevent the band from joining IV in Brighton tomorrow. Like the saying goes, “Man plans, God laughs.”)
Mike West and the Missing Links deserve their flowers, and in a small way Mike’s influence will be felt throughout the rest of the night, for after singing another new song (with the hearty refrain of “so damn blue”), Coleman Williams puts down his own guitar and plays Mike’s black-bodied acoustic for the rest of the Strange Band’s set.
“Hey Mike, thanks for letting me use your guitar again,” Coleman says later, after a fine cover of Harlan Howard’s ‘Nashville Women’ characterised by some great lead guitar from Ethan Salas. “I’m pretty good at re-stringing, but you saved me about three minutes, brother, thank you so much.”
Hunter Edwards strikes his drumsticks together to count in the next song, and Alex’s pedal steel begins to play. Coleman holds up his finger. “Hold on,” he says, and the band stops. “Y’all need to give it up for Mike West one more time, please. I thanked Mr Mike and nobody clapped.” The audience obliges; there hadn’t been any disrespect, only miscommunication.
“Remember,” Coleman says, “the friends that matter are the ones that help you, not the ones that just help themselves. Keep those around. We appreciate ya, Mike.” It’s a worthy tip of his black cowboy hat to the man he calls a brother; in addition to his own excellent music, Mike West also works tirelessly to promote other independent acts in the British country scene through Rogue Country, the enterprise he runs with Welsh singer-songwriter Josh Beddis. “Y’all Europeans don’t seem to dig openers as much,” Coleman says, “but I’m really happy to have a friend to play music with for a couple of days, so y’all treat him right next time he comes through here.”
But there’s no real admonishment in IV’s remarks, only observation. What I find particularly interesting in tonight’s performance by the Strange Band is IV’s strength as a frontman. He has character and he has star power – and that’s not a lazy reference to his heritage on my part. When Coleman stands on stage, tall and slim and with a thick, drooping horseshoe moustache, it’s not any fanciful shadow of Hank that fills out the image. It’s Coleman himself; he can draw you in and he can push you away at will. He can silence a heckler, as he does when introducing ‘Diddle’ (“I have no idea what the fuck you’re saying,” he says sharply, “but we’ll talk about that later. This next song’s about gettin’ wild.”), and he can praise the rest (“Y’all are what I call weekday warriors. You showed up on a Tuesday, it shows you give a damn. Fridays and Saturdays are easy.”). He can bare his heart, introducing ‘The Bleed’ by pointing out it was written about a friend who called him for help. He didn’t answer, thinking it was nothing. “He died,” Coleman says, “and I have to live with that”. How he processes the harsh reality of that is heard in the rasping, pained vocals of the song itself.
He can tell a story, bringing a lump to the throat when introducing the tender ‘Hang Dog’, written for his elderly basset hound Piper (“my best friend in this world”), and defuse it with warmth and humour, telling us that whenever he came home to Piper to break the bad news after a bad day, “well, she already looked disappointed before I told her any bad news”. He can dedicate the song to “all your critters, all your pets” and mean it.
He can gloss over a lull due to technical difficulties with a guitar (“us rednecks just put a pick on it and it makes noise,” he says, just before these rednecks prove they can’t half pick some noise on ‘Malice’). He can charm, dedicating the song ‘I.O.U.’ like a smooth radio DJ to “all of you broke jokers out there”. Ours is a world where fortune favours the 500, but IV reassures us with a smile that “you gon’ cut that gold one day” and that because you know the struggle, “when you get it, you won’t lose it”.
He can whip up the band, shouting “show ’em, boys!” during a hot moment or “alright, Frog, show me!” before Ethan’s guitar solo in ‘Malice’. He can sermonise, talking about “the real Nashville, not the bullshit” and how 90% of the historic town has gone in the space of ten years, “all turned into condos and fuckin’ Apple stores”. He has an edge to him, not only in the stories between songs but in the songs themselves, with an occasional fierce look in his eye as he sings the lines he has penned. It goes without saying that the son of sin breaks tonight’s 10 p.m. sound curfew, and is still talking and playing as we creep towards a transgressive half-hour mark.
And above all, remarkably, he can make you forget he is IV, fourth-generation scion of the Hank Williams clan, even in the same breath that he is mentioning the man himself. Coleman is his own man, and when he approaches me at the merchandise stand after the show and shakes my hand, I can honestly say I don’t think for a moment about his family name. There’s no journalistic guff I could write here about feeling in that handshake a connection to legacy or to country music history. Because when Coleman thanks me for coming out and asks with sincerity if I enjoyed the show, I can look him in the eye and say I did, very much so, because it has been a cracking night of music from him and his Strange Band.
There has been no setlist (“we just figure out what we feel like”, Coleman admitted earlier) and IV and the Strange Band have frequently been heard murmuring and nodding among themselves tonight as they decide which song to go with next. It’s that feel, I realise later, that has helped make the night so memorable. I’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of live country here in the UK, some of the finest America is producing in a fine moment right now, but all of them felt far from home. As great as they were, through no fault of their own they were still far from home. Mike and the Moonpies came closest to conjuring, in Manchester’s Retro Bar, that sense of what I imagine it’s like to be a native in a close honky-tonk bar in country music’s heartlands, but that’s what it was: a conjuring trick from a magical band.
But tonight, in Manchester’s Deaf Institute on the first day of their first visit to England, IV and the Strange Band are at home. When the band plays, or Coleman speaks, this feels like the place to be. They are among their own people. Coleman has broken through the chains that bound him to his family name and he shows people what he wants to show them, plays them what he wants to play. And it means that when we hear country tonight, we hear country. We hear a tight band in a small spot and a singer carving out his own ground and standing on it and defending it. As a country fan, I hear talk so often about whether such-and-such an artist is authentic or real, or whether a twang is affected or a hat deserves to be worn, or whether an Englishman can even truly appreciate country, but there’s none of that shit tonight. Maybe it’s an inheritance from the more welcoming punk and metal scenes the Strange Band has embraced. But tonight there’s a man on stage doing exactly what he wants to do precisely because he wants to do it, and there’s a band on fire behind him.
Those early country boys, Coleman says as he introduces his final song, “they were wearing a five-piece suit covered in rhinestones and telling you to fuck off with a smile. That’s why I love country, folks. It means so very much to me. For years, people thought that when I walked up on a stage in my early career, they could harass me, they could yell at me, they could bother me, to make me pretend to be Hank Williams. And guess what? Not one fucker ever achieved that goal.
“Because that’s not why I do it, folks. Because one day when I die, I will face my great-grandfather. I will see that wonderful, talented, beautiful man and the one thing I can tell him is: We all love you. We are all so proud of you. And I didn’t have to pretend to be you, because you taught me the lesson that I truly needed to know, and that is to be myself. Do not forget: I love Hank Williams.”
Coleman gestures out into the crowd.
“And if you love him, don’t be scared to tell me. Please don’t. Just remember, just remember that he was not somebody’s son. He was not somebody’s grandson. He was not somebody’s nephew. He was just a man with not a dollar in his pocket at 24 and a dream. And he achieved all that.
“For years, people would yell at me, scream at me, threaten to kill me, one dude even shot a gun at me, because I wouldn’t sing Hank songs. And I don’t give a shit about that. Because at the end of the day, I do it for me.
“I wrote this next song on my second record. It’s called ‘If the Creek Don’t Rise’. It’s about Hank Williams. Because, folks, I don’t see a need to pretend to be him. I’m from Nashville, Tennessee. I can walk down Broadway and hear sixty people sing Hank Williams songs every night of the year. There’s no reason I need to add to that, because nobody could ever do it better than Hiram King Williams. No one could ever do it better.
“And I wrote this song to show my love for my great-grandfather. From the bottom of my heart. A song that I wrote about him, because every day on the radio the last two years of his life he told people that if the Lord was willing, and if the creek didn’t rise, he’d see you next week.
“But the sad part about this, and the problem I think with music in society, folks, my last note I’ll leave you with: We clap people into a grave a lot in music.
“There are lots of musicians far beyond just him that ask for help. Ian from Joy Division. Kurt from Nirvana. Hank Williams. They ask for help. And we clap them into a pinewood box. And then we’re surprised that they died.
“Every single week, three times a week on the radio, my great-grandfather said that line at the end of every show. Why would a man that’s so young, with all the money in his pocket and all his dreams, say that? Because he didn’t expect to make it to the next day, folks.
“And I wrote this song about that, and I just want to say thank you to all of you, and just know, thank you again for supporting live music. Not me, but live music. This is a song about my family, thank you.”
Setlist #1 (Mike West and the Missing Links):
(all songs from the album The Next Life and written by Mike West, unless noted)
Work On
Lonely Hill (unreleased)
Ballad of the White Collar Arsonist (from The Attic Sessions)
Mothman (single)
For Them
Away I Go
Goin’ to Hell (from The Attic Sessions)
How to Build a Guillotine (unreleased)
Rainbow in the Dark (Ronnie James Dio/Vinny Appice/Jimmy Bain/Vivian Campbell) (unreleased)
No Grave
Setlist #2 (IV and the Strange Band):
(all songs from the album Hang Dog and written by Coleman Williams, unless noted)
I Thought You Knew* (unreleased)
E-450 (unreleased)
Son of Sin (Coleman Williams/David Talley/Jason Dietz) (from Southern Circus)
The Bleed
Drinking Sad (Williams/Daniel Mason) (from Southern Circus)
Why I’m Walkin’ (Stonewall Jackson) (unreleased)
So Damn Blue* (unreleased)
Malice (from Southern Circus)
Inbred (from Southern Circus)
Diddle
I.O.U.
Sailin’ On (Paul Hudson/Gary Miller/Darryl Jenifer/Earl Hudson)
“Skywatchers are in for a treat this week as seven planets will all be briefly visible in the evening sky. This phenomenon, known as a ‘planetary parade’, is a rare sight… The best chance to see will be just after sunset on Thursday.”
BBC NEWS, 26th February 2025
On this night we can, if we choose, bear witness to a rare event. Mercury may not be in retrograde (or even hanging around on tonight’s setlist) but, as I queue outside the Albert Hall on Manchester’s Peter Street, not far from where Rutherford first split the atom and Joule first found his charge, I can look up into the evening sky and see a great light.
No star this, but a planet. Not divine intervention, not yet; and if Jupiter has a faerie it does not reveal it as it hangs almost directly above and shines its reflected light. Nearby, in what astronomers call a ‘planetary parade’, other planets are visible in the same sky. Venus and Mars the brightest, but the distant gas planets also apparently discernible way down here on Earth.
But from Peter Street, with its high buildings and its electric lights beating out the dark, only Jupiter is bold enough to burn through. When I return home tonight I will have an opportunity for a better view but, for now, I turn away, and give my attention to a different star. Johnny Blue Skies tonight, to Manchester’s delight.
Unlike the charted sky, I went into the Albert Hall not knowing what I would see from Sturgill Simpson and his band. I confess that I’m not the most devoted Sturgill fan: I came to his stuff late, having first heard the name through protégés like Tyler Childers, and find his often-remarkable songwriting sometimes under-served by odd, left-field production choices on his albums. This can make some of the songs hard to love.
But I had enjoyed his latest album, Passage du Desir, released under the pseudonym Johnny Blue Skies, and felt it had the most palatable sonics for his songs since Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the genre-reviving album that made his legend. And this legend was strong enough that when I learned he had a reputation for being an excellent live act, I could readily believe it. That was enough for me to be here at Manchester’s Albert Hall tonight, forsaking a planetary parade in search of a more earthly phenomenon.
If I had not known what to expect coming into the night, I could, in retrospect, have known it all within the first ten minutes of Sturgill and his band arriving on stage. ‘Fastest Horse in Town’, tonight’s first song, is the night in microcosm. There has been no opening act and no talk from Sturgill; the first sound the audience hear from the stage is a power chord, followed by Miles Miller’s drums building. After a few minutes, Sturgill’s vocals come in, and the night’s sound is established: the song is epic and stately, almost like stadium rock, and the band have a lot of fun finding its groove. Lead guitarist Laur Joamets finds a great riff, and while there are the occasional country licks in this rendition of ‘Fastest Horse’, the tone is established: this will be a night of rock ‘n’ roll jamming.
The second song seems to give the lie to my assessment, a short and steady country song called ‘Juanita’, but it leads right into ‘Mint Tea’, which re-establishes the dominant rock tone of the night and features some good organ-playing from Robbie Crowell. ‘It Ain’t All Flowers’ begins a long, uninterrupted three-song sequence of high-quality jamming from what proves to be an extremely tight band, but it also shows that they won’t be hurried. They have three hours tonight to play what they want to play and they make the most of it.
A few minutes into ‘Flowers’, a heavy guitar riff announces its transition into an extended blues-rock jam, which eventually segues abruptly into the honky-tonkin’ ‘Long White Line’. The song is an early highlight of the night, not only for its change of pace but because the vocals are clearer. From my place near the back of the venue, I will struggle to hear the nuances of Sturgill’s vocals throughout the night. With the Albert Hall becoming a now-familiar haunt for me, I suspect this to be in part an issue with amplified bands at the venue. (I encountered the same issue with the soul rock of Marcus King here last year, but not for the acoustic set of Oliver Anthony some months earlier.) Nevertheless, the struggle also appears to be in Sturgill’s voice tonight. Fortunately, the playing is supreme, and if the music often overpowers the lyrics I’m at least thankful that the music is good.
‘Long White Line’ changes into the band’s usual exploratory jam, before going straight into ‘Best Clockmaker on Mars’. Another early highlight, ‘Clockmaker’ opens with some great guitar riffs, returning to the same anchored riff as the song descends into jam territory. There’s some excellent guitar shredding from Laur and some nice saxophone touches from Robbie Crowell. Bringing this glorious three-song jam to an end, the band is afforded a rare breather as the crowd breaks into applause.
‘I Don’t Mind’ starts gently, carried by Sturgill’s warm singing and some strong harmonies. It’s a gem of a song, rightly kept free of the rest of the set’s jam flourishes, and amidst tonight’s powerful riffs it serves as a timely reminder of Sturgill’s songwriting chops. It’s immediately followed by ‘Right Kind of Dream’, delivered almost as a piece of heartland rock, indulging some delicious riffs and some wailing, Duane Allman-esque guitar from Laur.
The Estonian evokes another guitar hero in the next song, ‘All Said and Done’, following some great saxophone notes from Robbie with a guitar line reminiscent of David Gilmour. As if resenting this Pink Floyd intrusion, Sturgill’s guitar joins Laur’s in weaving some Allman Brothers-esque guitar lines into the follow-up, ‘If the Sun Never Rises Again’. The song is a great slice of soul, a distinctive crowd-pleaser played straight by the band. As the song from Passage du Desir that’s easiest to love, it wouldn’t surprise me to see ‘Sun’ rising on Blue Skies’ setlist for many years to come.
“Hello, my son,” Sturgill sings to cheers, as the crowd recognises ‘Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)’. Showing the expansive range of his band, the song features some fine work from Laur, now seated behind a pedal steel guitar, and morphs into something funkier, prompting some fine saxophoning from Robbie. The song rolls straight into a languid ‘Living the Dream’, which itself goes straight into ‘A Good Look’.
‘A Good Look’ is Sturgill’s band at their most ferocious, with the return of those Allman-sounding guitar lines and a great organ solo from Robbie after the band establishes a groove. The band go into full-on jam mode, full of guitar riffs and shredding, before crashing ten minutes later straight into a cover of The Doors’ ‘L.A. Woman’. It’s not a sophisticated song, but all the better for it – it allows the band more space to roam. With his voice buried in the sound, Sturgill shows he’s no stentorian Jim Morrison, but his shout of “Come on!” prompts another extended bout of heavy rocking.
As Miles’ drums boom the song’s end, Sturgill thanks the crowd for their roars. “How you guys doing, Manchester? You with us? Alright.” It’s the first time he’s really addressed the crowd in what, less than half-way through the night, is becoming a feat of endurance for both band and audience. However, nobody seems too affected, and certainly nobody wants it to end.
Sturgill takes the self-imposed lull as an opportunity to change the pace. The bending country steel of ‘Just Let Go’ is played straight by the band, but pretty soon they are returning to an expansive rock sound in ‘One for the Road’. It’s a slightly funky and soulful jam, with some impeccable drumming from Miles and some Gilmour-esque guitar to lead the song out in its final few minutes.
Again resenting the Pink Floyd intrusion, the ghost of Duane Allman beats down the door. A languid cover of the Allman Brothers’ classic ‘Midnight Rider’ becomes another extended jam, a gentle, dreamy slope down to a close that goes straight into the distinctive searching organ riff of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The Procol Harum cover is well-received, but Sturgill is well aware of how much expanse the goodwill of the audience has granted him to cover.
“How many of y’all had no idea – thought you were comin’ to a honky-tonk country show?” he says, in a rare address to the crowd. “Well, you’ll get a little bit of that, I promise. Sorry for all the heavy rock ‘n’ roll, we’re just kinda goin’ through a thing, you know what I mean?” As though in apology, he leads the band into one of his country-rockers ‘Life of Sin’, played straight, before descending into ‘Turtles All the Way Down’. The crowd sing along from the start of this, one of Sturgill’s best songs, and it’s unusual for the night in that ‘Turtles’ allows us to focus on the lyrics. The effect is marked; following the applause, there is an extended thoughtful silence, the longest pause between songs all night.
‘Brace for Impact (Live a Little)’ builds for a few minutes into a blues groove, fuelled by a propulsive bass line from tonight’s forgotten man Kevin Black. After ten minutes of blues jamming and weeping guitar, the song folds straight into ‘All Around You’, a more constrained jam.
The distinctive opening riff of ‘Jupiter’s Faerie’, played on Robbie’s organ, is picked up by the guitars, and Sturgill provides some excellent vocals to complement these tender, searching lyrics about learning an ex-lover has committed suicide. Strong enough to also hold a classic rock solo amongst its heartache and tragedy, the emotionally mature ‘Jupiter’s Faerie’ transcends itself and becomes anthemic. “Thank you very much,” Sturgill says humbly, as the organ brings the song to a close.
After a straight-up country song in ‘Water in a Well’, characterised by some great pedal steel, the band jive with the funky blues of ‘Scooter Blues’. With its relaxed, guitar-bending tone, it reminds me of a J. J. Cale song. This new Sturgill original sees its author loose and languid and enjoying himself, as he has been all night. With the night drawing to a close, the band plays the UB40 song ‘Red Red Wine’, prompting a drowsy singalong from the crowd. The slow, sleepy song is held in place by Miles’ tasteful drums in perfect time, and is given the occasional pep by Robbie’s organ. Sturgill sings tenderly, before leading into another slow song, ‘I’d Have to Be Crazy’.
‘Crazy’ builds to a big ending, a sign that Sturgill and the band aren’t going to let us go gentle into that good night. “Naw, hold on, hold on,” Sturgill says after a false start on some blues riffing. “If we’re gonna do this, do it right, play some fuckin’ T. Rex on this bitch.” It leads to one final extended roar of Sturgill’s tight and ferocious band, Laur Joamets bending notes and shredding his guitar through a wild cover of Marc Bolan’s ‘The Motivator’. Sturgill himself takes a solo and, after ten minutes, the band shift into ‘Call to Arms’, a blues rocker infused with more meaty riffs. Miles Miller’s drums thrash heavily and Sturgill stalks from the drum set to Robbie’s keys, as the music builds and builds and thunders to a close.
Sturgill throws his pick into the crowd and unslings his guitar. The band take in the deserved applause but, as suddenly as it had started, nearly three intense hours earlier, the music is over. As the crowd filters out, I find my initial reaction is one of release, of weight being lifted; perhaps understandable after a relentless, heavy assault of music over nearly three hours.
But it is a strangely energised weariness, and as I head down the stairs I suspect that my initial thoughts upon hearing Johnny Blue Skies tonight need refinement. As I leave the building, I recognise that I have become a bigger Sturgill Simpson fan than I was when I entered, even if the night at the Manchester Albert Hall hadn’t felt quite like the mercurial event I was anticipating.
But as I walk out into the night and travel home, the songs settle in my mind, becoming vivid in the memory where music can often fade. I sit in my back garden weary, with my dog at my feet, and look up at the black skies. The longer I look the easier my eyes are able to filter out the light pollution and show me the purity of the stars. That hidden tapestry can never become more than a few isolated points of light, not here in the city, but the longer you look the more they show themselves. Mars, home of aspirant clockmakers, is stark and clear in the east, Venus in the west. The great giant Jupiter hangs heavy directly above. Another night or two and the planets will part and go their separate ways, not returning to this sequence for another decade or more.
I stay outside a little longer, even after the dog shuffles inside in the cold. Moments of synergy, whether brought to us by sky or by stage, are to be cherished.
Setlist:
(all songs written by Sturgill Simpson, unless noted)
Fastest Horse in Town (from Sound & Fury)
Juanita (from The Ballad of Dood & Juanita)
Mint Tea (from Passage du Desir)
It Ain’t All Flowers (from Metamodern Sounds in Country Music)
Long White Line (Buford Abner)(from Metamodern Sounds in Country Music)
Best Clockmaker on Mars (from Sound & Fury)
I Don’t Mind (from Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1)
Right Kind of Dream (from Passage du Desir)
All Said and Done (from Sound & Fury)
If the Sun Never Rises Again (from Passage du Desir)
Welcome to Earth (Pollywog) (from A Sailor’s Guide to Earth)
Living the Dream (from Metamodern Sounds in Country Music)
A Good Look (Simpson/John Prine) (from Sound & Fury)
What can be said, at this point, about Paul McCartney? It is a question I ponder for more than a week after seeing him live in Manchester, finally fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine – the culmination of a musical journey that began when I first heard ‘Twist and Shout’ as a seven-year-old in the mid-Nineties.
The concert reviews I’ve written over the last couple of years have mostly been for young up-and-comers in an exciting independent country and roots scene, where the reviews tread on new ground and the writing therefore comes fresh and easy. I can sometimes tell myself that documenting such nights of music from artists who deserve to be better known is a worthy pursuit; perhaps an advertisement for their music or, in some small way, an encouragement to the artists themselves as they seek validation of their art. Or perhaps those reviews will be redeemed by posterity; perhaps one day it will be something to brag about that I heard Sierra Ferrell’s voice fill a small hall shortly before she began filling arenas, or the Red Clay Strays just as they were becoming the next big thing in rock music. Perhaps it will be of use someday, when they are spoken of as legends, to have written of Tyler Childers and Billy Strings live. Perhaps it will have been of value to report on the purity of Kassi Valazza’s voice as she played in a church or a bakery, or the infectious dance-hall fun of Nick Shoulders in a pub in Bolton. But what could I hope to write that says something fresh and interesting about Sir Paul McCartney?
No one needs a critique of songs so universally admired, nor a blow-by-blow report of a night of music for which greatness can – correctly – be assumed. There’s no call for a live dissection of a Beatle, and it would be quixotic to even try to explain that magic. This is a man who not only wrote songs like ‘Yesterday’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but also wrote so many other gems that those three – and many other deserved numbers – don’t even make the almost three-hour setlist tonight, or even occur to us as omissions. This is an artist who can afford to leave out dozens of his No. 1 hit singles. He was one of The Beatles. The Beatles.
That may be one observation I could write about. I’m certainly not alone in the depth of my love for the Beatles’ music, or the mythology surrounding them – there are 22,000 other people here tonight in the new Co-Op Live arena in Manchester who could put forward a similar claim. But even so, it seems surreal that the voice I hear from the stage tonight is the same one I’ve heard in my ears pretty much every day since I was a young boy. The voice doesn’t have the astonishing versatility it once had – a fact that becomes apparent in a few of the songs tonight – but it remains admirably strong and distinctive, and continues to rest in these melodies as effortlessly as the melodies themselves seem to have been created. At the risk of sounding like a gushing fool, at more than one point tonight I find myself thinking: This is Paul McCartney stood in front of me. He was in The Beatles.
Certainly, no one ever carried the weight of history so lightly. Of the four – the Fab Four – Paul McCartney always seemed the one most at ease with Beatlemania, and with the legacy the band has left in the decades since. Where John snarked in the years after the breakup, Paul tended. Where George grumbled and sighed, Paul cheered. Where Ringo went along, Paul took a mind to lead. After John died, and became an untouchable icon rather than a man of flesh and blood, Paul shared the memory of his friend and was not made bitter by tragedy or burden.
Even tonight, as his band first takes the stage and there is an audible rush as tens of thousands stand from their seats, there’s no apparent ego on display as Paul takes in the applause. There’s no faux-humility later on when telling anecdotes in between songs; no need to clarify that it’s Harrison he’s referring to when he talks about “George”. Part of the secret sauce of Beatlemania was that the Four appealed as personalities as well as musicians, and Paul has maintained this effect. Even anonymous in a crowd of tens of thousands, you feel a personal connection.
It starts, funnily enough, with ‘The End’; the Beatles’ original harmonies announcing Paul and his band on stage as the arena’s vast screens project a fizzing video of that iconic Höfner bass. The same bass is slung around Paul’s neck as he approaches centre-stage. Far from shying away from that imposing word ‘Beatles’, Paul acknowledges the thundering elephant in the room and makes it dance to his own tune. George Harrison’s cover of ‘Got My Mind Set on You’ plays as I pass the ticket barrier to enter the venue. Instead of an opening act tonight, a DJ provides a long, slaloming remix of various Beatles snippets, including ‘Revolution’, ‘Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. A retrospective video followed, projected on the big screens, relating key Beatles moments and soundtracked by songs like ‘Twist and Shout’ – which reaches the seven-year-old boy still inside me – and 2013’s ‘Early Days’. Later, in between songs, Paul will casually hold up that iconic “Beatle bass” in the palm of his hand as he speaks to the audience – as though it were no big thing, and not a totem for millions. At one point, he’ll ask the audience to give him a good, old-fashioned Beatlemania scream – the audience obliges with a deafening shriek that would put Shea Stadium to shame.
But this is no lazy nostalgia act tonight. Although Paul gives the audience what they want – he opens with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, immediately granting the audience the license to revel unashamedly in our Beatles lust – he and his band deliver a well-balanced and well-performed setlist. Only four of the first ten numbers are Beatles songs, and the band delivers the four Wings songs of this opening salvo with gusto (‘Letting Go’ and ‘Let Me Roll It’ rock particularly hard, with the latter incorporating a coda inspired by Jimi Hendrix).
Having been together longer than the Beatles and Wings combined, Paul’s touring band are a well-oiled machine. Paul Wickens keeps it tidy behind his keys while still providing moments of dash. Brian Ray and Rusty Anderson are anything but rusty, providing harmonies and delectable guitar lines throughout. The big, bald Abe Laboriel Jr. is by no means the spitting image of Ringo Starr, but is more than able to fill those big shoes with his fills. Sometimes the band provide lively facsimiles of the original songs; sometimes they are able to spread their wings. They fulfil both parts with aplomb. When, later tonight, a dancing Abe drops his drumsticks during ‘Dance Tonight’, he recovers so smoothly you suspect it might even be a rehearsed piece of Chaplin-esque comedy.
Sometimes maligned or undervalued, or dismissed as uncool, the Wings songs are the dark horses at full gallop tonight. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’, from the Band on the Run album, follows the slow, jazzy ‘My Valentine’ and really gets the blood pumping again with its funky throughline and grand, rock-opera closing. The glam-rock ‘Jet’ is sung lustily twenty songs into the set, while ‘Band on the Run’ is as fresh as ever, particularly in that irresistible acoustic-guitar break in the middle. Wings were fun and endearingly over-the-top, and nowhere is that more in evidence than in ‘Live and Let Die’, played towards the end of the night, with fireworks exploding around the stage and blasts of heat spreading throughout the Co-Op arena. As the song ends with another cacophonous salvo of fireworks, Paul leans on his grand piano with his fingers in his ears, perhaps rueing the day he decided live and up-close explosives would be a good idea for a song he’d still be performing into his eighties.
Over the thirty-six songs Paul sings tonight, his age never becomes a hindrance. Even when dancing grandad-like from piano to centre-stage and back, the passage of the years seems unfathomable, such is the energy and enthusiasm he shows for the crowd and the enduring quality of the songs. Remarkably, Paul even seems to grow in strength throughout the night, with a heavy, intense ‘Helter Skelter’ being a highlight of his encore.
‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is perhaps the quintessential McCartney song – perfectly balanced and so seemingly effortless it looks easy, and yet something only this one man was able to do. It’s also one of Paul’s most vocally-challenging songs, which holds him back a bit tonight, more than fifty years after it was recorded. But Paul doesn’t shy away from this passage of years either. Throughout the song, a video plays of a young, bearded Paul with a baby snuggled in his sheepskin coat. After it ends, Paul says “that baby is here tonight – and now has four kids of her own”.
‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, if you chose to analyse it at length, epitomises all that is good about Paul McCartney both as a musician and as a person. Written as the Beatles were breaking up, despite his efforts to hold them together, Paul found comfort in love – of both a woman and his two daughters – and domesticity, and didn’t baulk at expressing that vulnerability in music. It led to one of his most quietly remarkable songs, which we have been privileged to hear tonight.
The night is also quintessentially McCartney in other ways. Long derided as the upbeat or ‘uncool’ Beatle (though I would personally argue that bearded, domestic look from ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is cooler than anything John Lennon put together), Paul has always seemed unfazed by such a characterisation, and willing to embrace it if it means everyone is having a good time. It’s an outlook that allows everyone to bop along happily to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ tonight. And it means that when Paul says he has “a surprise” for us, and ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ then begins to play, that much-derided earworm takes on the form of pure joy.
Paul unapologetically indulges the naff-ness of it all. His three horn players – who had been having the time of their lives with earlier songs like ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’ – reappear on stage dressed like Christmas elves, jingling bells. A choir of local schoolchildren appear to sing “ding dong, ding dong”. Fake snow is released from the top of the arena and cascades over the crowd. That the man who wrote some of the most important rock songs of all time is also responsible for this, and willingly embraces it, feels surprisingly wonderful.
One wonders what John Lennon would make of it all. Perhaps, as Paul sings tonight in his tender, acoustic tribute ‘Here Today’, he’d laugh and say that they were worlds apart. Perhaps, being unafraid of a bit of silliness himself, Beatle John would join in; after all, as Paul also sings, he was always glad he came along. That, by the way, is one of the most impactful lyrics Paul ever wrote, encompassing in a stark and understated way the simple friendship that underlay the most remarkable creative collaboration in popular music.
The spectre of John Lennon is always there. Where much of the weight Paul shoulders so well can be disassociated with an abstract “Beatles” label – able renditions of ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ (“the first song the Beatles ever recorded”) find their way onto the setlist tonight – some moments are clearly more personal to Paul, more closely linked to the friends of his storied past.
A nod to John with the John-penned Sgt. Pepper song ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ is followed by Paul plucking away on a ukulele that he says was given to him by George. He sings the first couple of verses of ‘Something’ (a “fantastic song”, Paul says) on the ukulele, and the whole crowd sings along too. The song builds and the band enters, turning it into the rock number it started out as on Abbey Road. Images of a grinning George Harrison are projected onto the screen as Paul pays homage to his friend, more than twenty years gone now himself, with one of his most admirable musical achievements.
The song is the only one on the setlist tonight that Paul doesn’t have a writing credit on (though he did contribute that remarkable bass line on the original). It is the presence of John Lennon – that co-writer, collaborator, singing partner and friend, taken before his time – which looms the larger. And Paul, with his intrinsic goodness, doesn’t confront this ghost: instead, he embraces it.
For the first song of the encore, the band pick out the opening riff of ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, from the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert. Paul says the performance of the song is “special to me – you’ll see why”. Soon enough, we do – and it’s a special moment in a night full of such moments. In the song’s final verse, John Lennon himself sings out of the speakers – “everybody had a hard year” – as the screens project him singing from the rooftop concert. Paul joins in and, just as they did on the freezing cold rooftop of Abbey Road Studios in 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sing the song to its conclusion – together. Not only do we in the audience get to experience something special – Lennon/McCartney united again – but Paul also gets to experience something denied him. Once more, with feeling, he is able to sing with his friend again.
Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time. So sang the Beatles, prophetically, in the medley on the Abbey Road album. And you can’t help but be amazed at how well Paul shoulders that burden, the pain and the expectations that have continued throughout the decades. We get a sense, sometimes, that it’s not effortless. Nowhere is that more apparent than on ‘Now and Then’.
A song John Lennon recorded on tape in the late Seventies, ‘Now and Then’ was worked on during the Anthology sessions in the Nineties (when George was present) but the audio was deemed too poor quality to be released. Using AI to reconstruct John’s voice, the recording was finally completed by Paul in the last few years. This, the Beatles’ last hurrah, reached No. 1 last year, and tonight is its first live performance in their home country. At its end, Paul McCartney leans forward on his piano with his hands clasped, and looks thoughtfully over the rapturous, applauding crowd. Tears are in his eyes. One can only imagine the gratification, the weight of burden released, he feels at that moment, more than forty years after John scratched “For Paul” onto a cassette tape – a tape which only found its way into his friend’s hands after his senseless murder. “And if I make it through, it’s all because of you.”
Elsewhere, we are provided with some obligatory Paul McCartney concert moments that, no matter how many times they must have been played over the years, still sound fresh. Those ubiquitous late-period Beatles songs ‘Get Back’ and ‘Let it Be’ are played in quick succession towards the end of the set, each bringing back that surreal feeling that this is Paul McCartney singing them in front of me. Paul McCartney. He was one of The Beatles.
There is, also, as the final song of the main set, that inevitable concert singalong, ‘Hey Jude’. Perhaps only the AI that reconstructed John Lennon’s voice could calculate how many billions of ‘na-na-na-na’s have been sung over the years, but everyone – Paul included – is happy to add many more tonight. It is a communal moment, bringing tens of thousands of people together, just as the music has long brought together millions across the generations and across the years, across cultural divides and language barriers. The Beatles did that, it was what they did above all else, and it was a remarkable thing.
And throughout it all, from a church fête in Liverpool in 1957 where he met John Lennon to the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester a couple of weeks before Christmas in 2024, Paul McCartney has been the one constant. The most famous man in the world, stood in front of us on a stage, full of energy and singing his cornucopia of melodies, having changed the world but refusing to rest on his laurels. A man as beloved, essential and ever-present an icon as the Queen he sang about at the end of Abbey Road (the medley of which, sans ‘Her Majesty’, caps off the music tonight). While everyone has a favourite Beatle, there can be no doubt as to who is the greatest Beatle.
“Now we’re gonna go back in time,” Paul had announced after performing ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ earlier tonight. “We’re going to a little place in the north of England – about half an hour down the East Lancs, I think. A little place called Liverpool…” And tonight in Manchester, about thirty minutes down the East Lancs Road from his hometown (traffic permitting), Paul McCartney has shown just how far he has come. It has been a life lived without peer.
What can be said then, after almost 3,000 words, about Paul McCartney? About the magical touring act, I can say: Satisfaction Guaranteed. Paul leaves the stage after nearly three hours on it, kissing the camera as he does. He throws on a jacket and high-fives an audience member. A rock-star entourage filters him out the door just like in the movies.
But about the achievement, the life, the music, I can say nothing new. I can only point out things said that are not true. During that opening retrospective video, projected onto the big screens three hours earlier, a news announcer from the Sixties was clipped as saying “Beatlemania is a temporary state of mind”. Sixty years later, as applause and energy still ripples around the arena, we can say that is untrue. Beatlemania is lasting. It might even represent something eternal.
Perhaps all there is to say after a night like this is to wish a Merry Christmas to Paul and his family. For your career and your melodies, for your matchless creativity, for your personal integrity and enduring goodwill: Merry Christmas, Paul McCartney.
Setlist:
(all songs written by Paul McCartney, unless noted)
A Hard Day’s Night (John Lennon/Paul McCartney) (from A Hard Day’s Night)
Junior’s Farm (single)
Letting Go (from Venus and Mars)
Drive My Car (Lennon/McCartney) (from Rubber Soul)
Got to Get You Into My Life (Lennon/McCartney) (from Revolver)
Come On to Me (from Egypt Station)
Let Me Roll It (from Band on the Run)
Getting Better (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Let ‘Em In (from Wings at the Speed of Sound)
My Valentine (from Kisses on the Bottom)
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five (from Band on the Run)
Maybe I’m Amazed (from McCartney)
I’ve Just Seen a Face (Lennon/McCartney) (from Help!)
In Spite of All the Danger (McCartney/George Harrison) (from Anthology 1)
Love Me Do (Lennon/McCartney) (from Please Please Me)
Dance Tonight (from Memory Almost Full)
Blackbird (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
Here Today (from Tug of War)
Now and Then (Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Ringo Starr) (single)
Lady Madonna (Lennon/McCartney) (single)
Jet (from Band on the Run)
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Something (Harrison) (from Abbey Road)
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
Band on the Run (from Band on the Run)
Wonderful Christmastime (single)
Get Back (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
Let it Be (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
Live and Let Die (single)
Hey Jude (Lennon/McCartney) (single)
Encore: I’ve Got a Feeling (Lennon/McCartney) (from Let it Be)
Encore: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (Lennon/McCartney) (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Encore: Helter Skelter (Lennon/McCartney) (from The Beatles)
Encore: Golden Slumbers (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)
Encore: Carry That Weight (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)
Encore: The End (Lennon/McCartney) (from Abbey Road)
Though the relationship has been a troubled one, there is an affinity between the world of the church and spiritual matters, and the world of science and futurism. Historically less acknowledged by the church (think Galileo and the Inquisition), it has increasingly been embraced as Christianity has mellowed – or been tamed – in the West. Nowadays, the affinity is less acknowledged by the scientists, for any admission of metaphysical depths can be seen to stray from science’s core tenet of rationality.
The relationship is not only historical – astronomy’s early nurturing under ecclesiastical patronage, for example – but conceptual. The yearnings of people throughout the millennia to look to the heavens, to understand the firmament, possesses many of the same inclinations as the scientific quest to reach for space. Indeed, it could even be that the first religious ideas in early man were seeded by the sight of those stars in the sky.
It is a conceptual synergy that has been embraced by Blackburn Cathedral, which hosts tonight’s suite of music from the 2014 science-fiction film Interstellar. The church organ will be played by Roger Sayer, who played the organ on the original score after being approached by composer Hans Zimmer. In his Q&A session tonight, Roger remarks to the audience that the organ itself looks something like a spaceship. Its vast pipes clamber up the walls of the cathedral and the effect of regal otherworldliness, of celestial visitation, is enhanced by the vast crown of thorns, designed by John Hayward, which hovers suspended over the organ.
So compelling is the scene – and soon, the music – that one can almost forget about the vast Moon suspended above. In the nave, above the seats of the congregation, a gigantic replica sphere of the Moon draws the eye, and I am able to find a seat almost directly beneath it. I could almost reach up and touch it.
This, of course, is precisely the same thought one has for the real Moon when it stands bright in the sky and looks almost close enough to touch, a tantalising feeling which has surely provoked much of mankind’s wanderlust for the stars. I sit in my pew and look up at the swaying marias, for the installation rocks gently, almost imperceptibly, on its strings. I recall Galileo’s famous remark about a different sphere: “And yet, it moves.”
So too does the music. When Roger Sayer is announced, to applause, and takes his seat at the organ, his back is to the audience. It matters not – the visual treat of the church architecture provides tonight’s theatre. As the organ summons, almost cinematically, its first huge intake of air, those of us in the audience have all this vast majesty to contemplate, rather than the seated figure of the organist.
The first music of the night isn’t Hans Zimmer’s score from Interstellar. The dean of the chapel had earlier announced that this would not take place until after the Q&A and intermission. Instead, Roger begins with a suite of music from Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. As those distinctive, majestic notes begin for ‘Sunrise’, better known as the iconic music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are reminded that this conceptual affinity between science and religion, between space and the firmament, is not an idle one. It is one that has been recognised (if not always acknowledged) by many artists. I consider myself one of them, though of course a minor one; my science-fiction novel Void Station One was initially conceived of as a purely rational, indeed atheistic, story, but ended with a completely unexpected – even to me, as the writer – welcoming of the concept of a god.
For his part, Roger Sayer reinforces this graceful affinity with a second suite of music from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Again, to uncultured philistines like myself this music is best known for inspiring some of John Williams’ motifs for Star Wars, particularly in the first part of the suite, ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’.
Unfortunately, my ear cannot catch any of these, nor any of the nuances Roger Sayer has delivered in his two suites of organ music so far. A young couple who sat themselves directly in front of me moments before the music started have been gossiping amongst themselves throughout, ducking their heads and whispering and giggling. Considering this is music to focus on and contemplate, their behaviour is immensely distracting.
I tell myself that soon they must settle, but instead they begin to fidget in the pews, the wood squeaking relentlessly and disrupting the music for those of us unfortunate to be sat near them. I spend the majority of ‘Venus, the Bringer of Peace’ contemplating war, and ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’ despairing that the entire night of music is passing me by.
I sigh and mentally add it to my unfortunately ever-growing record of poor concert behaviour, but my attempt to resume concentration on the music is interrupted by a loud “Pssch-thock!” sound. The male of the couple has opened a can of beer that he has smuggled into the church. The loud, disruptive sound prompts more giggles from the pair. As the grand, celestial organ music brings to mind the concept of musica universalis, these two have reminded me that while Heaven may be in the spheres, Hell is other people.
Roger Sayer’s suite of Holst’s music ends, to applause, and the couple decide to leave their seats during the brief intermission. I assumed this would be a bathroom break, or perhaps they intend to nip to the local off-licence, but whatever the motive, thankfully a miracle occurs in the cathedral. The pair do not return, and the rest of the night is uninterrupted.
The next part of the night is a Q&A with Roger Sayer, who has approached from his organ to address the audience. It is a fascinating session, as Roger details his role in the development of the music for Interstellar a decade ago. Roger had no hand in its creation by Hans Zimmer, but the composer came to him to use the organ at Temple Church in London. Zimmer had made samples of music using the organ at Salisbury Cathedral, not realising that each church organ produces its own unique sound, and his samples could not be adequately recreated at Temple Church.
Roger Sayer is in his element here; he speaks eloquently about the organ as an instrument, about the pipes and the bellows and the keys and pedals and the configuration of stops which produce each unique organ note. At the end of the night, after the music ends and the crowd disperses, those of us who remain find we can approach the altar for a closer look. With its keys and pedals and stops, with sheet music propped up as a map through the aural terrain ahead, the organ looks like the pilot’s console of a spaceship, as Roger had suggested earlier.
As it breathes, Roger says, the organ in effect provides a never-ending note; his stops and keys manipulating the sound as the vast intake of air is expelled through the pipes and a reservoir of breath is pulled in by the bellows. This was one of the reasons why it was so apposite for Zimmer’s Interstellar score: not only the sensation of breath in the airless void of outer space but, in travelling seamlessly from the highest note to the lowest, the instrument can convey the vast sense of distance depicted in the spacefaring film.
When Roger does return to his seat, after a twenty-minute interval, and begins the final movement of the night, the score for Interstellar, it is that highest note he begins on – and which, a remarkable passage of music later, he will end the night on. This is also the note which the film began and ended on as the credits played, and I find that Roger’s Q&A session has served as a valuable primer on some of the nuances of the music I am now to experience.
Interstellar is one of my favourite movies. Epic, inspiring, rational and beautiful, it was one of the primary inspirations for my own novel, Void Station One. A month ago I managed to expunge one of the small errors of my life when I got the opportunity to watch the majesty of the film for the first time in the cinema, on its tenth anniversary. I had been unable to do so when it was first released as I did not have any money at the time, and I always regretted it.
On that anniversary rewatch, still fresh in my mind, I felt goosebumps as it opened onto that dusty bookcase in Murph’s room and the first distinctive motif from ‘Dreaming of the Crash’ by Hans Zimmer began to play. I feel the same again tonight in the cathedral as Roger Sayer begins to play the same motif, which throughout the movie keeps this daunting, cerebral paean to astrophysics grounded in the tender, longing father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murph.
As Roger moves expertly through the wealth of music of Interstellar, I am able to lose myself in it, mapping the notes onto the scenes I know so well. The lonesome, tragic void of ‘Stay’ as Cooper leaves his daughter and travels the silent void of space. The questing brio as our astronauts enter ‘The Wormhole’. The forbidding natural terror as they realise what those ‘Mountains’ really are. The thrilling triumph of willpower and skill that is communicated in ‘No Time for Caution’.
“Cooper, what are you doing?” “Docking.”
The context of the cathedral puts the music back into a classical setting, allowing us to see it as the masterpiece it is. Just as Strauss’ famous music was written to soundtrack a ‘Sunrise’, so too does Zimmer’s work stir the soul even when removed from the film it accompanied. In my writing, whether that is in my fiction or in my reviews, I am often prone to lamenting the loss of talent in our modern culture, the ways in which we fail to match up to the mores and standards of our civilisation’s brighter days. Tonight, Roger Sayer has reminded me that remarkable things are still happening in our art and music. Those inquisitive, ethereal notes of ‘Day One’ deserves to reverberate throughout the centuries, and be played by hands that have not yet been born, in times – perhaps spacefaring ones – that have not yet come to pass.
At the end of the night – having ended, as promised, on the highest note – Roger turns to the audience to receive the deserved applause. He bows and then turns, raising his hands to the majesty of the organ. In his Q&A, he had mentioned that the original score was actually six organs playing at once. Such amplification of power I experienced in the cinema, but tonight Roger’s solitary organ has sufficed to deliver the most profound and most majestic and also the quietest, most sombre aspects of the score.
In that same Q&A, Roger had said he would not perform the full score of the film – which would be hours long, too much perhaps even for a dedicated Interstellar fan like myself – but instead a condensed version of it that he first transcribed a decade ago for a rendition at the Royal Albert Hall. In all that time playing Interstellar’s music, he says, “I never tire of it.”
After the music ends and the audience has filtered out into Blackburn town, I head out into the autumn night and look up at the dark sky. So compelling has been the cathedral and the music that I had almost forgotten about the vast Moon suspended above, and yet it had always been there, that satellite reminder that there are worlds yet to explore. Like Roger, I would not tire of Interstellar’s music and its enterprising spirit. One must also hope that humanity never tires of the yearning and fascination with the outer worlds that inspired Interstellar’s creation. Perhaps then we will one day find mankind among the stars.
As I head down the stone path of the church grounds I stop and look back. The cathedral is welcoming, eternally welcoming, with the warm light pouring out of its doors. While it is not as singular a building as York Minster, which I visited prior to a previous concert just a few months ago, Blackburn Cathedral rests in that remarkable spot many of our stone churches reside: havens of tradition, an anchor against the rapid developmental change that churns through the rest of our towns; architecture from when that word was synonymous with art rather than economy.
As the organ notes of Interstellar continue to thread themselves through my mind, I find myself thinking looking at the stone building and thinking that if art is how we decorate the space we hold, music must surely be how we decorate our time.* And the same harmony between space and time that scientists identify in an equation is something that we can understand intuitively on nights like tonight.
Setlist:
Suite No. 1 – Also Sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss)
Suite No. 2 – The Planets (Gustav Holst)
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Q&A and Intermission
Suite No. 3 – Interstellar (Hans Zimmer)
* This quote is often attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The evening starts, ominously, on a sour note. At 6:40 p.m., twenty minutes before doors, a steward steps out to speak to those of us who are at the front of the queue, waiting patiently in the autumn chill.
“Hi guys, just so you know, there’s no support act tonight. The main act will come on at 8:45 p.m.”
The steward moves away and repeats the same to those further down the line. Still within earshot, I crane my head back to make sure I had heard him right. Many in the queue grumble, early birds rewarded with no worms. Some peel off to go find a bar or a place to eat. All of a sudden I have two hours to kill.
I look up at Marcus King’s name lit up on the board outside the Manchester Albert Hall and contemplate leaving entirely. While I’ve been a fan of King’s music for years I’m not one of his devotees, and I had bought a ticket for tonight largely out of curiosity. I retained the hope that, as with other gigs I’ve attended, the live setting would allow for a different perspective that would deepen my connection to the artist. Coming just twenty-four hours after I attended a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert that raised the bar for my understanding of the magnificence a live act can generate, Marcus King already had a Herculean task to not make his own night feel ordinary in comparison. A vastly unfair comparison, to be sure, but the steward’s announcement – the management’s decision – has not made it easier.
There had been no communication in the days or hours beforehand that this would be how it was, and whether it’s a last-minute change or something that was always in place (we’re not told the reason), it seems a poor way to treat fans who queue for a show that states doors are at 7 p.m. Based on the grumbles I hear, I’m not the only one to feel this way. As one man puts it, “why would he not just go on a bit earlier? Say, at 8 o’clock?”
For my part, I of course decide to stay – this would be a peculiar review if I hadn’t. I bury my feelings of pique deep but, when the doors open at seven, no one sees much of a need to rush inside. The night is not especially cold and we’ve not been made to feel any warmth. In the shuffle of the crowd, two men who had been queuing behind me have found their way, by honest means, in front of me. They stop themselves and apologise, but I allow them to go ahead. We agree with a rueful smile that there’s no need for haste.
Inside, I make my way up to the balcony area and settle down on the step seating, my back against the rear wall. The next hour and forty-five minutes pass slowly. As the venue fills with people and the people fill the time with chatter, music plays out over the sound system. There’s a litany of soul music – ‘I’m a Ram’ by Al Green, ‘Family Affair’ by Sly and the Family Stone – as well as some left-turns (‘Caught Between the Moon and New York City’ by Christopher Cross sneaks in there). Though it passes slowly, the time admittedly passes easier than I thought it would when the steward made King’s announcement. But I still can’t help but feel that the stereo fills ears where an opening act should be. Whatever the reason for the decision, it reflects poorly on those involved.
Fortunately, the audience never seems to grow unduly restless, and by the time Marcus King and his band do finally arrive on stage it is to hearty cheers. And when they begin to play, all is forgiven.
It’s hard to review the set of music that we are delivered here in Manchester’s Albert Hall tonight. Partly this is because of the loose jam nature of the music, incorporating soul, blues rock and a bit of country into a relentless stream of aural goodness. But it is also partly because Marcus and his band dive straight into that stream, plunging deep with the opener ‘The Well’ and scarcely coming up for air for the rest of the night.
‘Hero’ and ‘Beautiful Stranger’ are early highlights, and by the time of the eighth song, ‘Rita is Gone’, one of my favourites, it is possible to start to form an opinion. “Rita is gone,” Marcus sings, in that classic soulful wail of his, and so is The Marcus King Band. Only drummer Jack Ryan remains of the original line-up that played this song on the self-titled album from 2016. The replacements are stellar – Eric Vogel on bass and Mike Runyon on keys, while Drew Smithers plays like Duane Allman reborn on electric guitar – but I do find myself rueing that I missed out on that original incarnation live; the bursting, exuberant potential that still came through on the studio recordings. It felt very much like The Marcus King Band, rather than Marcus King and his band, which is how tonight feels. A band in synergy capitalised in name, in contrast to a band that is subject to its King. One which tore through ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong with That’ and the songs on the Due North EP.
This is not to speak against the music tonight, which is excellent, but more a comment on where Marcus King is at this moment in time. The albums that King has created since he decided to release as a solo artist have taken time to grow on me, in contrast to that astonishing immediacy of the earlier Marcus King Band records. It is why my decision to attend tonight came from curiosity and from a hope to deepen my connection to the artist, rather than the kid-on-Christmas-Eve excitement I’ve felt ahead of other gigs. It feels like we’re not necessarily seeing Marcus King at his peak, but in a holding pattern. One only has to look to another young guitar virtuoso given to live band jams to see how King may not have seized his moment in the way some of his contemporaries have – Billy Strings has gone stratospheric where King has, in some ways, stalled.
This is reflected in the songs. While the band tears through the setlist, a mix of covers and original material both new and old, with considerable skill, soul and jam-band dexterity, I can’t help but feel like Marcus King doesn’t yet have that one knockout song that will floor you and leave you asking for more. ‘Goodbye Carolina’, played towards the end of the set sweet and pure, comes close, but the specialness of the music tonight comes from the band’s sometimes soulful, sometimes storming play on each number, rather than any one number proving itself prime.
To write such things seems strange when the band is on the stage, rocking and swinging through a heady brew of soul, blues and country. ‘8 a.m’. Merle Haggard’s ‘Workin’ Man Blues’. A short but resonating acoustic cover of Tyler Childers’ ‘Shake the Frost’. A one-two-three punch of songs from the Mood Swings albums, every swing a hit. The music thrills everyone in the hall, myself included. King might lack that one knockout song – for now – but he’s a solid hitter who always stands a puncher’s chance.
The band save their best for last, the final song of the main set a storming extended cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’that allows each musician a moment to shine, whether that is Eric Vogel’s slapping bass solo or Jack Ryan’s powerful drum solo. The synergy continues into the deserved encore: ‘Wildflowers and Wine’, a slow and soulful piece of gold from El Dorado, rolls straight into a lusty cover of the Percy Sledge classic ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, featuring a great, showy “guitar hero” solo from King.
The final song of the night sees the band cut loose on a cover of The Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man’, with King shoehorning Manchester into the lyrics (to cheers) and trading some thrilling guitar lines with his Skydog regen Drew Smithers. As the song continues to play, King leads the audience in praise of each of the musicians in turn. For his part, Jack Ryan raises his hand in acknowledgement without missing a beat.
The song ends to roars and cheers. King throws his guitar pick into the crowd like a coin into a fountain. His puncher’s chance has come up trumps, and he raises his cowboy hat in salute. He and his band have hit hard tonight. As the crowd filters out into the Manchester night, I find myself thinking that if I am right and Marcus King has not peaked, has not yet done his best work, then that should excite all those who venture to hear good music.
Setlist:*
(all songs from the album Mood Swings and written by Marcus King, unless noted)
The Well (Marcus King/Dan Auerbach/Ronnie Bowman) (from El Dorado)
Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother (Mark Farner) (unreleased)
Hero (King/Auerbach)
24 Hours at a Time (Toy Caldwell) (unreleased)
Beautiful Stranger (King/Auerbach/Paul Overstreet) (from El Dorado)
This Far Gone (King/Tobias Jesso Jr.)
Inglewood Motel (Halestorm) (King/Peter Levin)
Rita is Gone (from The Marcus King Band)
Are You Ready for the Country? (Neil Young) (unreleased)
8 a.m. (from Carolina Confessions)
Workin’ Man Blues (Merle Haggard) (unreleased)
Honky Tonk Hell (King/Gabe Lee) (unreleased)
Save Me
Mood Swings
Bipolar Love
Die Alone (unreleased)
Shake the Frost (Tyler Childers) (unreleased)
Goodbye Carolina (from Carolina Confessions)
Fuck My Life Up Again (King/Dexter Wansel)
Lie Lie Lie (King/Auerbach) (from Young Blood)
Moby Dick (Jimmy Page/John Paul Jones/John Bonham) (unreleased)
Encore: Wildflowers and Wine (King/Auerbach/Bowman) (from El Dorado)
Encore: When a Man Loves a Woman (Calvin Lewis/Andrew Wright) (unreleased)
“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the Church there is no salvation.”
Catholic doctrine, from the writings of saint cyprian
“Cave stalks the stage… While he evokes a tent preacher, he is also sexual, gothic, and his message, unlike an Old Testament preacher, damns no one.”
Darcey Steinke, in ‘Stranger Than Kindness’, 2020
In the concert reviews I have written over the last couple of years, mostly covering the exciting emergence of quality in the country and roots scene, I have occasionally made reference to a line by Walter Pater that all art aspires to the condition of music. This I have cited as my caveat that writing about music often ends up destroying the magic in it, turning the experience of sung gold into mute and lumpen lead.
Nevertheless, I have persisted in writing reviews for all of the concerts I have attended since. There are many reasons for this, but one reason I have always found valuable is that the writing allows me to explore something I have not yet worked out, some truth or quality that I experienced in the performance which I can only identify when reviewing afterwards.
So what to do, then, when the music you have heard live is so potent, the performance itself so perfect an expression, or representation, of those intangible truths, that a written record is both necessary but also doomed to failure? Tonight brings forth a condition of music that all other art not only aspires to but cannot hope to reproduce. Powerful and yet tender, strutting and yet fragile, profane and profound, epic and cinematic, intimate and full of energy, possessing of both joy and pain, and succeeding in creating an experience that is impossible for this review to give even a bare facsimile of. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds provide a musical epiphany on the Manchester stage tonight. At times it feels like glory in its purest form.
No doubt this will seem like hyperbole to some, but there is something in great music that stirs us on a deeper level, and I have never heard it brought forth as vividly as it has been tonight. After the engrossing experimental soundscape provided by the opening act Black Country, New Road (lead vocalist Georgia Ellery and bassist Tyler Hyde look iconic on the large black-and-white screens of the Arena), the audience is well-primed for the main act of transcendence which is to follow.
When they do take the stage to roars and applause, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds do not so much blossom as burst into flower, as immediate and exuberant as if it were the First Day of Creation. I confess now, with some shame, that the new Wild God album didn’t completely win me over when I first listened to it on release day, but in a live setting its songs are beyond intoxicating. The first three songs tonight – ‘Frogs’, ‘Wild God’ and ‘Song of the Lake’ – are all from that record and (as Nick Cave is on record as suggesting) they are indescribably epic live. A large screen behind the band flashes up with occasional lyrics, emphatic punctuation to the grandest moments. “Bring your spirit down!” it flashes during ‘Wild God’, with Nick pumping his fist. The audience is already captured by the exhilarating sensory wave. They stun animals for the slaughter with less force than Cave and the band have come out with tonight.
The Bad Seeds seem to be brimming with energy. They have been rampaging across Britain and Europe since September and will land on American shores in April next year. Our cup runneth over; alongside the usual figures of bassist and guitarist and keyboardist there are two percussionists (Larry Mullins looks to be having the time of his life) and four gospel singers in shining robes. There is also the long-bearded Warren Ellis, wild and free, the epitome of a crazy genius. Tonight he will be leaping and reclining and playing a thrilling distorted violin sound like a Hendrix of the homeless classes.
And at the front, rushing throughout the night from the piano to the catwalk, reaching out into the crowd to grasp at hands that reach out like Joshua trees, is Cave himself. He is in complete command of the legion of men and women in the arena tonight. He is vulnerable and seeking and compelling in his art, but also matchlessly confident. At one point in the night he leans into the audience, propped up by the hands, and gives his microphone to one outstretched hand, secure in the knowledge that when he is finished with his gestures the mike will still be there to seize. He dances and yells, sings and whispers, stalks and struts and sinks to his knees. So complete is his connection with the crowd that it reminds us that this Renaissance man – composer, author, poet, artist, screenwriter, compassionate conductor of the Red Hand Files – is first and foremost a rock star, in the finest meaning of the word. He is an icon and a conduit.
The view of the Balcony Man. (“You balcony people,” Nick had gestured earlier in the show.)
Could anything be gained if I were to write a blow-by-blow account of the night, as I have for other concerts? Others have done so, and done so well, but for me in recollection of the night, every moment seems to press upon one another. Time seems to collapse in on itself like a glorious star. There is the rollicking rhythm of songs like ‘From Her to Eternity’ and the doom-laden ‘Tupelo’, which seems to almost summon up a thunderstorm beneath the dome of the arena. There is the resonance of the lyrics (“a ten tonne catastrophe on a sixty-pound chain” rolls off Nick’s tongue emphatically on ‘Jubilee Street’) and the warm humour with which Nick addresses the audience between songs.
There is the emotional, hard-won lament of ‘O Children’, about Cave’s realisation that “we cannot protect our children” from the world, a message that is poignant not only for the well-known tragedies his family suffered in the years after penning those lyrics, but because it is sung here, in the Manchester Arena, a place where children were once murdered by a man who saw himself in service of a far wilder god. “Lift up your voice,” the gospel choir sing, and it is as though the song recognises that horror will always come and that to acknowledge this is enough. (“There’s either a remedy or there is none, and if there is none, never mind”, Nick sang in ‘Song of the Lake’). Wisdom comes when you realise that armour does not work, after a lifetime spent forging it. Only then can you make peace with things, recognising that wounds will come but trusting in your ability to heal.
There is also the tenderness of ‘Long Dark Night’ and ‘Carnage’, and the unnerving malevolence of ‘White Elephant’, sounding as stark and real as the earlier vibrant chants of “You’re beautiful!” from ‘Conversion’, a refrain which is repeated by Cave at the end of the show. There are the high, pure vocals of Warren Ellis, like a castrato with balls, on ‘Bright Horses’, and the basking in the familiarity of old favourites ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ and ‘The Weeping Song’, the latter two in the night’s impressive encore.
There is the distinctive chiming of ‘Red Right Hand’, a gloriously dark crowd-pleaser, into which Cave inserts one of his many implorations for fans to get off their phones (“he’s in your stupid little screen”, he sings, gesturing to one concert-goer). These calls to live in the moment, not through the screen, are all delivered charmingly from the stage, and for my part I only take enough photos to colour my review. Cave’s flattering yet insistent, good-cop, bad-cop approach seems to me better than Bob Dylan’s approach in Liverpool a couple of nights earlier, when phones were required to be locked away in pouches. Cave persuades the majority of us; his show is so astonishing that to seek to capture the night seems like sacrilege.
Sacrilege.
The night also manages to hold the vulnerability of ‘I Need You’, played solo by Nick Cave at the piano. The song seems to age this energetic figure in the blink of an eye; its prescient, pleading lyrics of “Just breathe” as raw as they must have been when recorded amidst the family tragedy of Skeleton Tree, “that night we wrecked like a train”.
But above all there is, remarkably, the passion and revelation of the new songs from the Wild God album; the ferociously loving and transcendent music of ‘Cinnamon Horses’, ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ (“oh, the rain, oh, the rain”) and the appropriately-named ‘Joy’. If you delve into the religious and spiritual writings of which Nick Cave is himself deeply invested, you may come across the terror of angels; the idea that the full love of God is impossible to bear, that real joy is a flame impossible to behold. All art aspires to the condition of music because music is the one that brings us closest to beholding this eternal joy; it touches us more simply and profoundly and overwhelmingly than anything else can.
It is this which Nick Cave has managed to harness, delivered most assuredly through his newer songs but also embracing his older catalogue, with well-known songs that are decades old, written with other motives, brought into the host and shown to belong to this eternal quest for joy and release that underpins all artistic expression. In my review of Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave’s latest book, I wrote that in his art Cave is not so much stumbling around in the dark as stumbling around in the overwhelming light, and that light is on full show tonight.
It is an intensity felt by everyone; by those of us in the crowd and by those on stage and by Cave himself. The final song of the encore sees Nick Cave alone at the piano under a solitary spotlight, singing ‘Into My Arms’ from The Boatman’s Call. Our dark pilot through hidden waters gestures towards the audience, trusting us to finish off his song. The final verse is sung touchingly by the crowd, converted now into the church invisible. Accompanied by Nick on the piano, the final note is a perfect rest, proving that, contrary to Catholic doctrine, extra Ecclesiam omnis salus – outside the Church, there is every salvation. Even, perhaps, for those who remain on their phones.
That salvation is to be found in art that seeks. It is to be found in music like tonight’s, music of the purest expression.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Wild God and written by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, unless noted)
Frogs
Wild God
Song of the Lake
O Children (Cave) (from Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus)
Jubilee Street (from Push the Sky Away)
From Her to Eternity (Cave/Anita Lane/Blixa Bargeld/Hugo Race/Barry Adamson/Mick Harvey) (from From Her to Eternity)
Long Dark Night
Cinnamon Horses
Tupelo (Cave/Adamson/Harvey) (from The Firstborn is Dead)
Conversion
Bright Horses (from Ghosteen)
Joy
I Need You (from Skeleton Tree)
Carnage (from Carnage)
Final Rescue Attempt
Red Right Hand (Cave/Harvey/Thomas Wydler) (from Let Love In)
The Mercy Seat (Cave/Harvey) (from Tender Prey)
White Elephant (from Carnage)
Encore: Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry (Cave) (from Henry’s Dream)
Encore: The Weeping Song (Cave) (from The Good Son)
Encore: Into My Arms (Cave) (from The Boatman’s Call)
To review a Bob Dylan concert is to risk playing a fool’s game. For decades, these events have been known to be strange beasts; musically opaque and lacking in showmanship, with radically altered song arrangements and raspy, often barely comprehensible vocals from a now 83-year-old Dylan who often stays hidden from view behind his piano. Criticise these well-documented flaws – or features – and you run the risk of being seen to “not get it”, or to be disrespecting an all-time legend who, as his Nobel Prize citation correctly judged, “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. But to praise the events, or massage their jarring effect, often makes a reviewer comes across as esoteric or wilfully blind (or deaf), the review an embarrassed attempt to throw pants on a beloved but ageing emperor who is exposed naked on the stage.
For my part, I have little inclination to rehash the well-known pros and cons of a night of Bob Dylan live, suffice to say that they all crossed my mind on this night at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool. I can only offer my thoughts from having witnessed the live experience myself. These impressions are honestly given; the praise I give is not meant to be blind or effusive, and the criticism is not meant to be scornful or disparaging. I am a big Bob Dylan fan – I even liked Tarantula– but I don’t think he should be exempt from criticism, or nailed in place on a pedestal whenever he’s in danger of falling off. Although there is a cachet in having been to see the living legend in the flesh, I had no inclination to go to the zoo to gawp at a tired and ageing lion behind the bars, hammering out all the old hits. I made the hour-long drive to Liverpool filled with the same hope I attend all my gigs – to experience moments where I am turned, artistically and profoundly, by an artist who can see terrain that I cannot. And thankfully, for all the peculiarities of the Bob Dylan experience, that is what I received.
It is sight which is, quite literally, my first impression of the night. I arrive early at the cavernous arena and am well-settled in my seat by the time the lights go down and Dylan and his band come out on stage. (There is no opening act tonight.) The stage itself is dimly-lit, with only half-a-dozen warm yellow lights speaking meekly out into the crowd of thousands. Like everyone else, my eyes search for Dylan himself, but can see only a handful of indistinguishable silhouettes backlit by the small and insubstantial bulbs. By process of elimination, we can identify him as the outline of a profile hunched behind a piano on centre-stage, a microphone stand extending towards him. He will occasionally step out from behind the piano tonight, making him more identifiable, but he always shuffles back into the enveloping dark again.
It is a disappointment; the lighting an unnecessary contributor to audience dissatisfaction, particularly for those of us towards the rear of the vast venue. Throughout the night, I try to make a virtue of it, telling myself that it allows me to focus on the sounds, but such are the peculiar aural qualities of Dylan’s live music that I find myself sometimes struggling with that too. I also remind myself that this is the same sort of cope I had often identified in Dylan reviewers, my own throw of the dice in that fool’s game I warned myself of earlier. So too is the temptation to excuse this deliberately distant, low-lit figure as further evidence of Dylan’s inscrutability. But the honest truth is that, game as I am to take Dylan on his own terms, too often tonight I find my eyes and ears working overtime to filter out what is happening in front of me. My experience of the man and his music is at a significant remove.
As for the music itself, it is a mixed bag, though better than I had feared from Dylan’s live reputation. I realise that is not the most ringing endorsement one can give, but the long, ominous bluesy intro that announced the opening ‘All Along the Watchtower’ got my foot tapping and reassured me that, although the path may not always be smooth, there would indeed be a path. ‘Watchtower’ was otherwise unrecognisable as the song I knew both from John Wesley Harding and from Jimi Hendrix, while the radically changed arrangement and rasping vocals of the second song meant I only identified it as ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ towards its end.
The audience is on surer ground with the newer songs from the Rough and Rowdy Ways album, which are more recognisable in both their arrangements and their vocals – a fact which in itself supports the argument that Dylan’s peculiar approaches to other songs are a conscious choice (however inscrutable), rather than a collapse of skill or talent. ‘I Contain Multitudes’ is next up, followed by ‘False Prophet’, and illustrate the sound that Dylan and the band conjure tonight. Bluesy guitars are a persistent feature, as are chuntering rhythms underpinned by the drums of the legendary Jim Keltner, who colours the loose music tonight with tight, subtle drum fills. Dylan himself will bash away enthusiastically at the piano, sometimes out of sync with the rest of the band – an acquired taste (to say the least) that is not helped by the fact his piano comes through the amp much louder than any other instrument.
Nevertheless, Dylan’s rough and rowdy approach to the songs does sometimes pay dividends. A barely-identifiable ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ is nevertheless fascinating, as it opens with a Marc Ribot-style guitar line that reminds me of the Tom Waits song ‘Hoist That Rag’. ‘Black Rider’ starts slowly and its lyrics are delivered almost as spoken-word by Dylan.
I didn’t find much to remark upon in ‘My Own Version of You’, but ‘To Be Alone with You’ sees Dylan happily bashing away on the piano, and its up-tempo qualities are brought back down by the slow and bluesy ‘Crossing the Rubicon’. There is a sense of dissonance, of experimentation, of a looseness not so much akin to a jam session but more of an artist sifting through the raw material of a song. Dylan’s reverse-alchemy, unpacking a complete song back into its elements, can be jarring and sometimes unsuccessful, but it is interesting. At the risk of sounding like one of those coping mechanisms I accused other reviewers of using above, I peered at the hunched figure on the distant stage, a dark velvet curtain hanging low and lidded over the sparse lighting, and saw a restlessly bored genius, indifferent after sixty years of performing, who was looking to travel into those creative recesses where the music came from and offer us a glimpse, or at least a facsimile, of how it occurs.
Anyone who has tried creating art themselves in an honest way knows this creative place, its loneliness and its unpleasantness and how things seem to emerge out of nothing in that darkness where the muses dwell. Dylan has recreated this, and like a scientist seeking to hold a fundamental particle of creation for a fleeting moment of laboratory measurement, it is often a failure.
But when it is captured, as in the next song, it can be surprisingly exhilarating. ‘Desolation Row’ is one of Dylan’s most remarkable songs, and as Jim Keltner’s fast-paced drums begin to rumble, we in the audience can already recognise it as remarkable on the night. It feels better than it perhaps is, because the audience has had to work for it, but there is some fine harmonica from Dylan (bookended by some, well, enthusiastic piano-playing) and the song is well worth the ovation it receives at its end.
‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’, which follows, is interesting and lucid, but its sparse and slow arrangement leads to a bit of a lull. While movement has been happening in the crowd all night, the stream of people heading back and forth down the aisles becomes distracting. Like ants on a fallen Cornetto, they scuttle out through the lighted tunnels into the concourse, to buy beer and to piss and to buy beer in order to piss again. Dylan’s prohibition on mobile phones (we have had to lock them away in pouches provided by stewards at the entrances, so there are no photos or videos of tonight) seems to be a quixotic folly. The sort of people who consider it an outrage to be parted from their phones for two hours of live music will just find other ways of disrupting their fellow concert-goers.
Unfortunately, I’ve grown accustomed to poor concert etiquette, even as I still fail to understand why people would pay so much money for a show and then not pay any attention to it, but Dylan’s loose, disengaged approach does highlight the problems that can arise when the audience is not all-in. Perhaps that engagement is never possible given the oddities of a Bob Dylan live set, particularly in a large and impersonal arena, but I find I cannot entirely blame the waning interest of many in the crowd. While I remain engaged with the music, despite the distractions, it has required significant effort to do so in the low lighting and through oscillating arrangements and rasping vocals. Dylan live is a cerebral experience with fluctuating rewards.
It’s a shame that a lot of people seem to have decided the arena is merely an expensive and inconvenient boozer, because Dylan, who has been producing remarkable moments since the early 1960s, still has a few more moments of real worth to give us tonight. ‘Watching the River Flow’, which follows ‘Key West’ builds heavily with Dylan’s piano and also incorporates his evergreen harmonica sound. Bob’s cacophony works well for this song – or proves resilient to it, depending on your viewpoint – and it is a fine moment.
Its follow-up, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, is another radically different arrangement, a slow number with plaintive vocals that silences the crowd. The song from 1965, often interpreted as the newly-electric Dylan turning his back on his acoustic years, is a reminder that Bob’s determination to go his own way is no recent development. He follows it with the slow groove of ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You’, a lull that continues when he steps out from behind his piano to sing ‘Mother of Muses’, microphone in hand.
Another new song follows, although ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’ sounds much different from the album version. Tonight it is a higher tempo song, almost like a boogie, with some good guitar from the band. The arrangement hides the lyrics, but the music blossoms.
A distinctive guitar riff opens ‘Every Grain of Sand’. The peculiar flow of the set and the lack of showmanship tonight has failed to communicate to me that this will be tonight’s final song, and it is only at its end, when the lights come up, that I realise it is. Nevertheless, I have drunk the moment in, not because it is the last song I have heard – and perhaps will ever hear – Dylan sing live, but because it is special in itself, another of those moments I mentioned where a singular artist has managed to turn me onto unseen terrain. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ is delivered elegantly – it is one of the few songs tonight that doesn’t seem to end with an emergency stop, with Dylan the instructor tapping on the dashboard – but most remarkable is the harmonica sound that Bob provides in the song. It is one of his finest and most enduring qualities; the sound he creates with the instrument now in this Liverpool arena in 2024 is as clear and distinctive as it was on the songs of the Freewheelin’ album in 1963.
The song ends, and the crowd applauds. For all Dylan’s oddities, the ovation is deserved, and he comes to stand out front and centre on the stage for the first time. Exposed under the lights, that carefully lidded eye lifted a little higher to see, and coming so soon after those distinguished harmonica notes, we are reminded how bright this star once shone, and how it will one day fade for good, never to be replaced. The night’s impurities – the ragged vocals, the over-balanced piano, the occasional bum note – fade into insignificance, leaving only the finest moments. The harmonica on that final ‘Every Grain of Sand’. ‘Desolation Row’. ‘Watching the River Flow’. Such things have been worth seeking, even if we do have to parse through every coarse grain of sand.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Rough and Rowdy Ways and written by Bob Dylan, unless noted)
All Along the Watchtower (from John Wesley Harding)
It Ain’t Me, Babe (from Another Side of Bob Dylan)
I Contain Multitudes
False Prophet
When I Paint My Masterpiece (from Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II)
Black Rider
My Own Version of You
To Be Alone with You (from Nashville Skyline)
Crossing the Rubicon
Desolation Row (from Highway 61 Revisited)
Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
Watching the River Flow (single)
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (from Bringing it All Back Home)
I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
Mother of Muses
Goodbye Jimmy Reed
Every Grain of Sand (from Shot of Love)
My reviews of Tarantula and Chronicles, Vol. 1 by Bob Dylan can be found here.
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