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Songs of Law & Order, and Movement
Apr. 2nd, 2006 09:51 pmMozilla has just crashed, taking with it most of a longish post about going to see Martin Simpson, again, at the Studio, in Hartlepool. It was the first time we'd ever seen the Studio packed, and so the first time we'd discovered what a very noisy venue it can be: they don't close the bar during the performance, so there's a constant accompaniment of glasses clinking, coins chinking and people hanging round the bar chatting.
It was obvious from the first, because Martin Simpson's approach is to come on stage and, without saying anything, play some riffs which shift from tuning and warming up into an instrumental first piece - currently Alistair Anderson's Air for Maurice Ogg, leading into One More Day / Boots of Spanish Leather. And the undercurrent of noise just carried on: the majority of the audience were aware of it, and there was a certain amount of turning round and glaring and sshh-ing, and eventually even a remark from the stage, but with no perceptible effect.
The first half was much the same material as we'd heard at the Davy Lamp. Not an identical playlist: Gallivan Burwell's The Devil's Partiality (which he recorded on Righteousness and Humidity) has joined Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, complete with inane presidential soundbite, in his meditation on hurricane Katrina. From New Orleans to North Lincolnshire, with Bareback to Bullhassocks ("It's near Santoft aerodrome"), an instrumental recorded on Kind Letters with accordion by Chris Parkinson: playing solo, the guitar provides both the driving force and the dancing embellishment, which is slightly incongruous. And there were a couple of the big ballads which provoked one schoolchild to ask Simpson whether all his songs were about "law & order and movement", Little Musgrove and The Flying Cloud.
But he appears to have spent the break re-working his programme towards the louder end of his repertoire, and the second half was heavier of blues numbers. This was a bonus for the man sitting next to me: he had never heard Martin Simpson before, but had come along on the strength of the description of him as a world-class guitarist, and wasn't sure what to expect. During the first half he admitted that he preferred the blues, but after Rolling and Tumbling he turned to me and asked: "Have you ever heard anything better than that?". Later we had Jasper Songbird / Spoonful, so he was happy. And we don't have to read too much into Simpson's decision to end the evening with Richard Thompson's Down Where the Drunkards Roll, not when he does it so well...
But I'm not expecting to hear him again at the Studio.
It was obvious from the first, because Martin Simpson's approach is to come on stage and, without saying anything, play some riffs which shift from tuning and warming up into an instrumental first piece - currently Alistair Anderson's Air for Maurice Ogg, leading into One More Day / Boots of Spanish Leather. And the undercurrent of noise just carried on: the majority of the audience were aware of it, and there was a certain amount of turning round and glaring and sshh-ing, and eventually even a remark from the stage, but with no perceptible effect.
The first half was much the same material as we'd heard at the Davy Lamp. Not an identical playlist: Gallivan Burwell's The Devil's Partiality (which he recorded on Righteousness and Humidity) has joined Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, complete with inane presidential soundbite, in his meditation on hurricane Katrina. From New Orleans to North Lincolnshire, with Bareback to Bullhassocks ("It's near Santoft aerodrome"), an instrumental recorded on Kind Letters with accordion by Chris Parkinson: playing solo, the guitar provides both the driving force and the dancing embellishment, which is slightly incongruous. And there were a couple of the big ballads which provoked one schoolchild to ask Simpson whether all his songs were about "law & order and movement", Little Musgrove and The Flying Cloud.
But he appears to have spent the break re-working his programme towards the louder end of his repertoire, and the second half was heavier of blues numbers. This was a bonus for the man sitting next to me: he had never heard Martin Simpson before, but had come along on the strength of the description of him as a world-class guitarist, and wasn't sure what to expect. During the first half he admitted that he preferred the blues, but after Rolling and Tumbling he turned to me and asked: "Have you ever heard anything better than that?". Later we had Jasper Songbird / Spoonful, so he was happy. And we don't have to read too much into Simpson's decision to end the evening with Richard Thompson's Down Where the Drunkards Roll, not when he does it so well...
But I'm not expecting to hear him again at the Studio.
