Tiny Tin Lady: 100 Club

 Diary/Comment, Music  No Responses »
Jan 052010
 
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Originally on Twisted Ear:

PART A: The Story

When a good friend you haven’t seen for a while suggests you go and see some ’70’s pub-rocker doing Dylan songs, supported by an all-girl folk band described as ‘coruscating’ and ‘funky’ on their own website, what do you do? You try the ‘no money’ thing . . . and he offers to pay for the ticket. You try the ‘too much work on’ thing . . . he tells you you’re drifting rapidly into middle age and to cop yourself on, you boring git. You try the ‘last train back goes at 1.05’ . . . he reminds you this is London- it’ll all be over by midnight anyway.

So- out of excuses- you decide you’ve always liked the 100 Club, really, its sweaty, mystical niche in music mythology still just about intact despite its air-conditioned attempts to move into the 21st Century. And some of Dylan’s stuff, of course, is great, one or two songs transcendental: surely Steve Gibbons (yep- it was him) should be confident enough and competent enough at the age of 147 to at least treat them with enough disrespect to make ‘em bearable? And, and, and . . . What you’re certainly not going to do, you decide, is review the bloody thing- it’ll be a few pints, a few whiskeys and enough blurring of consciousness to cope with the whole inevitable soul-vacuum of self-indulgent wistfulness and over-reverence.

The club’s divided itself into two: on one side, a whisper-quiet anti-mob of polite middle-aged people sitting in rows of creaking wooden chairs like expectant parents at a school pantomime. On the other side, a bunch of balding blokes standing up, clutching pint glasses, ready- if they’re really, really impressed- to nod their heads a bit and even- and this is unlikely, but if SG does Like A Rolling Stone or something later, why not?- tap their feet.

And then support act Tiny Tin Lady come on and (despite the already-descending alcoholic mist) you realize THIS is why we love music. So much power and grace and melody, so many hooks that respect and drive home the please-understand-me’s of the songs (‘I’m not patriotic but I quite like it here . . . I’m no activist, but I’ll fight for you again and again’), so many melodies that don’t just hang there like all the rest, awkward and alone and transparent, but want to embrace us, celebrate our common absurdities together. Choruses- from familiar songs you’ve never heard in your life- that you know will stay with you for weeks. Strong, strong, strong guitar- guitar as percussion and rhythm and melody and communicator. Bass as Wobbley, punchy, driving backdrop to a sound that’s pop and blues and folk, reverent and vital simultaneously. Fiddle as urgent/plaintive, a soulful, swirling, circling swooping edge. A lead voice both tentative and assertive. Vocal harmonies- above all- that sweet-spit words of passion and loss across the centuries and remind you of everyone you’ve ever loved.

And suddenly- seven blazing, superbly crafted and crafty songs later- they’re gone and you realize there’s an outside chance you’ve just seen four very young, very focused people who might become huge. Who you really want to become huge.

Blimey. I have seen the future of folky/poppy/bluesy sort of stuff and its name is . . . um . . . Tiny Tin Lady.

PART B: The Facts

The setlist:

Pretty Eyes, Darling, Flowers In The Alley, Green and Brown and Grey, Can’t Touch, In My Room, The Sound Of Requiem

The band:

From St Helen’s. Which is up North somewhere. Formed 2004. Played Glastonbury and Cropredy. Supported Jah Wobble and Fairport Convention and Midge Ure. Playing across the UK in Feb and March next year. With Fairport Convention.

The advice:

Don’t be misled by the nice, unassuming (and fiddleless) aural glimpses of TTL on their MySpace site: there’s far, far more to this lot than that.

http://www.tinytinlady.com/

http://www.myspace.com/tinytinlady

(PS Steve Gibbons doing a bunch of Dylan songs seemed pretty good too. But- by that time- that was probably just the alcohol.)

Robert Wyatt- Comicopera

 Music  No Responses »
Jan 052010
 
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Originally on Twisted Ear

Extraordinary.

Left with a broken back after an alcohol-fuelled flight from a window in ’73, Wyatt’s been poking at the mainstream with an uncompromising, jazzy stick and a wry smile for four decades. Wheeling briskly in and out to drop the odd- odd– cover into popular consciousness (I’m A Believer, Shipbuilding), he emerged from Soft Machine’s prog-jazz to become one of music’s great collaborators- Pink Floyd, Costello, Weller, Eno, Sakamoto, Bjork, even bloody Sting- and one of its most insistent and empathic embracers and innovators. Continue reading »

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, Surrey University

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Jan 042010
 
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From Sound Of The World

 

Last time I was at a gig at Surrey University, it was some time in the mid-18th Century and Nine Below Zero were crashing through their driving, goodtime Cockney blues stuff to a remarkably unmoved, distressingly sober crowd of students. I reviewed the evening for the legendary punk fanzine ‘Throttle Talk‘ (no, me neither)- and likened the students to a bunch of statues.

In the three intervening decades, those statues hadn’t moved. Their hair had whitened or disappeared altogether, some busybodies had sneaked in to sew patches on their jacket sleeves, they’d been placed awkwardly on chairs. And they’d opened their stoney eyes in 2009 to find themselves motionless in front of a shifting, certain, fluid man, his wife and a gang of his mates- in front of a stage full of dark, different foreigners who were making a sound so Nine Below Zero and so utterly un-Nine Below Zero, so entrancingly soul-spattered, so multi-layered and weird and familiar, so deep and so surface, so of-this-world and so of-another, so sparse and so dense, so complex and so utterly, utterly simple, so visceral and so cerebral that it couldn’t fail to astonish.

Polyrhythmic, patterned, percussive, persuasive; the statues’ attention was forced from the smile and leisurely sensuality of Amy (her sweet, harsh voice wrapping emotions in sly syllables of almost-comprehensible wit and ache), to the various ngonis (stringed man-machines of almost-blues, almost-guitar funk, pluck and fire), to the calabash and the drums (funk and rock and neither), to your man himself (taller, robed smarter than everyone else, casual in his command, flying in his fretting, mock-struggling with English, intense in French).

This time round, my drink of choice was Jack Daniels (thirty years ago it was probably warm bitter). The JD melted the early awkwardness, the longing for comfort, the sneer at the politeness of the statues. It helped me see the strangely proggy moments, the hints at European folk on the songs from ‘Segu Blue’, the clear, clear message that the very best music takes from everywhere, everywhen, respects all our histories, swallows them, digests them, then spits them out and creates something altogether fresh and transcendent. Bassekou Kouyate’s no more ‘the Malian Hendrix’ than I am: tonight, more than ever, trapping him in lazy comparisons seems both silly and redundant.

So. Too many Jack Daniels and some of the finest music I’ve heard for years- a pretty good night . . . Oh, and by the end- most of the statues were dancing.

Monica Vasconcelos- Hih

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Jan 032010
 
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You’re listening to an album that – on the face of it – is a long, long way from rock and pop, is astonishingly alien at times, astonishingly familiar at others: what do you do?

1) First you can wonder- what is it that’s influencing the way I react to this? And you can answer:

The seductive, floating-sweet oddness of Vasconcelos’ (small but perfect) contribution to Robert Wyatt’s magnificent    Comicopera . . .

A (pissed) evening last week spent listening to klezmer in the old Jewish quarter of Krakow, moved, almost, to tears by words and sounds that seemed- on one level- incomprehensible . . .

Knowing sweet FA about Brazil, bar glimpses and hints: the shock of City Of God, the vigour and fun of CSS, the coma-inducing marshmallows of soft lounge, favelas, murdered kids and . . . the fact that, without the wonder, zest and spirit of the Brazilian teams of the 70s, you might not be the devoted (and long-suffering) football fan of today, chasing forever the chimera of your home-town team offering the same combination of ruthless effectiveness and miraculous skill . . .

2) Next you can think- maybe I should try and contextualize it? So you do:

We approach ‘World Music’ (that terrible, lazy ‘category’) with more than a little trepidation, those of us who grew up having swallowed the myth that one-two-three-four Anglo-American music (all of it, of course, in large part, African-derived music) was the only thing that counted, the only thing that could express how we feel. We approach Robert Wyatt and people like him- oddities, malcontents, revolutionaries simultaneously within and outside our own culture- with a similar apprehension: cognitive and affective and political challenges abound, the alienation of the languages- musically and lyrically- acting as a semi-permeable barrier to any attempt at dissolving into the music, at being moved and melted by it.  The temptation is then to patronise the alien, talk VERY SLOWLY AND VERY LOUDLY to it, whilst sticking, fundamentally, with what we know. We end up with a way of listening that shoves anything with significant jazz, classical, avant-garde, truly local elements, anything sung in Brazilian Portuguese, say, in Bulgarian, in Yiddish or even in an English accent, anything played on unfamiliar instruments, into a little box, patronized and patted on the head- we’re glad it’s there, equally glad if it stays there. We allow in reggae, say, Tinariwen, Buena Vista Music Club, Ali Farka Toure, maybe even Miles Davis, let through bits and pieces of the strange (which themselves have, of course, all been shaped, in part, by rock/soul/blues) to add some texture, bend things out of shape now and then. We maintain some pretty ferocious, if (thankfully) rarely predictable, border controls still: the blokes in the caps, sunglasses and automatic weapons do seem to have waved through a fair bit of Brazilian stuff over the last couple of decades, though, letting it hide in the lorry marked ‘Latin’. Some of its rhythms and playfulness and sadness- the love-life sex and swing of samba, of bossa nova, the morphing of indigenous and adopted US and European musics that’s become MPB- have become familiar, though never mainstreamed.

3) And then you can think- just get on with it: Continue reading »

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