not so much relentless as half baked

Piney Gir @ Upstairs at the Relentless Garage, 26th August

Piney Gir's MySpace biography makes a claim that her debut album fits into the ill-defined "electronica" category but in recent years she has played up to her Kansas origins by favouring a more country-based style. I wouldn't claim to be the biggest fan of this kind of music but Gir is an artist who I've warmed to on the couple of occasions I've seen her because of the pure energy and pizazz of her shows. She has jettisoned her previous incarnation as The Piney Gir Country Roadshow and is now billed--deep breath--as Piney Gir and the Age of Reason with the Reasonettes. Judging by what we hear tonight though, this doesn't seem to signify a move into yet more radically different musical territory. The songs are good enough and it's a typically bubbly performance but we get a disappointingly short selection. Maybe at £6 a ticket it's a bit churlish to complain about this. What does spoil things though is the poor quality of the sound: it's barely possible to make out the lead vocals.

For better or worse, ukuleles are big at the moment. The Leisure Society (see below) incorporate them nicely into their easy pastoral sound, but there seem to be a number of bands--most notably I suppose the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain--who are building careers as cover artists, often exploiting the supposed comic potential of an instrument most readily associated with the 1940s flat-cap filmic japes of George Formby playing the songs of the more profane modern era, like those who have their origins in the electric guitar-based posturings of heavy rock. Sure enough, the hysterically-titled Uke Attack!! Uke Attack!!--for it is they, one of tonight's support acts--plough through Judas Priest's "Breaking The Law" and Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" and the joke starts wearing thin in no time at all. In fact it's their kazoo-tastic version of Gerry Rafferty's MOR classic "Baker Street" which brings a reluctant smile to my face.

The small upstairs room at the newly-reopened Upstairs Garage--now the "Relentless" Garage--is a real disappointment as a venue: utterly soul-less, garishly lit with red and blue strobes, and cynically furnished with a handy ATM machine lest you run out of funds to buy more over-priced lager. Won't be hurrying back...

broadstairs revisited

Broadstairs Folk Festival, 8th & 13th August

Some highlights:

- Mississippi Ol' Macdonald: He's not old (late twenties, I'd say) and sounds like he's from nearer the Thames Delta than the Mississippi. His name may be Macdonald though. A great gravelly blues voice and some nifty fret work. Songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and other usual suspects. He's chock full of stories too, from his time in Memphis where he's been helping to raise money for a gravestone for O.V. Wright, unsung soul legend who died in 1980. It never occurred to me that steel guitars (he plays a National Steel for some numbers) are apt to go out of tune because they expand and contract dependant on the temperature. Obvious really...

- The Woodshed Session: I came here last year and recognise many of same faces this time. Individually they're called on in turn to sing or play a tune while the others strum, bow, blow and/or sing along with varying degrees of confidence. Some of them are impressively talented: a flautist improvises some interesting flute accompaniment to "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and an accordionist hurtles through a couple of reels at breakneck speed. Quite interesting that these hidden pockets of amateur music-making exist...

- Cocos Lovers were busking down by the harbour and I shelled out a fiver for a couple of CDs on the strength of their pleasing vocal harmonies and instrumental arrangements. I like their songs but I'm not sure how far that name will get them. Debut album coming soon it seems.

talk talk

Will Kaufman: 'Woody Guthrie - Hard times and hard travellin'' at the British Library, 25 February, and
Barney Hoskyns discussing Tom Waits and 'Lowside of the Road' at Waterstone's, Gower Street, 4th March.

The thing about music is that even with those singers or musicians who aren't right up there with your favourite singers or musicians, there's usually something you can talk about.

And the thing about talks about musicians is that they give you an authoritative, nicely-distilled account of the life and work in as little as an hour. I had a brief Tom Waits phase, in the early 1990s I think when, finger on the pulse as ever, I listened mainly to his early-eighties Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs albums. "Lowside of the Road", though, the new Waits biography, weighs in at a hefty 650 pages and I'm just not interested enough to plough through that.

Hoskyns divides the story into two parts. Waits spent much of the seventies hanging around bars in Santa Monica and song titles like "Closing Time", "The Piano Has Been Drinking", "The Ghosts of Saturday Night" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" give you a pretty good idea of his lyrical concerns in those days. Then in 1980 (Hoskyns's part two) Waits met and married Kathleen Brennan, under whose seemingly Yoko-esque influence he suddenly distanced himself from long-time associates and adopted a more experimental and theatrical approach in his music, viz.



Is it music? Is it theatre? Beats me. Great though, isn't it?

Will Kaufman is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, which means he gets to read and write about Woody Guthrie and is paid for it. Cuh eh? As a semi-professional folksinger for over thirty years, he also gets to sing Guthrie's songs. He makes a decent job of it too.

Born in oil boom town Okemah Oklahoma, Guthrie moved to Texas when the Depression set in then, with thousands of other "Okies", was driven from his home by the drought and ferocious winds of the Dustbowl and moved to California. Here he travelled round the migrant camps chronicling the Okie sufferings in the face of the outright hostility of the local community and the unions' struggle for acceptable working conditions and a decent wage.

As a songwriter, Guthrie was prolific to the point of manic obsession: huge amounts of material survive in the Woody Guthrie Archive, hundreds of song lyrics, many of them never put to music and some of them scrawled on bits of newspaper, napkins from restaurants, bus tickets, anything he could write on that happened to be to hand at the time.

Pictures and music like this tell you all you need to know about the Dustbowl. No wonder whole communities were uprooted and forced to move hundreds of miles away from their homes...

kicked into the blue grass

The Coalporters @ Half Moon, Herne Hill, 5th December

This style of music isn't really my thing but the Coalporters, the "world's first alt-bluegrass band", are such great performers that you can't fail to warm to them. They have some brilliant players--particularly Dick Smith, apparently the only full-time professional banjo player in the UK, and Hana Loftus on fiddle--and Sid Griffin (mandolin) and Neil Robert Herd (guitar) are slick and enthusiastic front men.

Griffin, it says here, "displays many chapeaux in his career as a multi-faceted musician", first surfacing in the early eighties as a member of the Long Ryders, purveyors of musical fare more reliant on the sound of the electric guitar.

Tonight they sing a mix of compositions by Hern and Griffin (including this Long Ryders oldie) as well as renderings of "Teenage Kicks" and Ronnie Lane's "Ooh La La" in a bluegrass stylee. Very enjoyable they are too.

The behatted Henry Brothers--Stephen Merchant look-alike on guitar and a psychotically grinning Charlie Chaplin on what I discover is referred to as "doghouse bass"--offer support with their gruesome murder ballads.

Check out the 'Porters on that there youtube: