On a Voyage to See George Ezra Live

 

So I'm not going to pretend I'm achingly hip and knew who +George Ezra  was a year ago when no one else did. I heard Budapest on the radio with everyone else. I bought it, then I bought the album, Wanted on Voyage, then I watched him on the TV at Glasto and knew I needed to see him live. 

I googled tickets and lo and behold...

Last Thursday, I got on the train to Kingston (WTF  haven't been there at night since I frequented Oceania) with my younger, musically more forward friend RB having purchased tickets to see George-ous at a student, live music nightclub called McClusky's. 

We obviously drunk too much rose before, slightly intimidated by the brash sun-worshipping, cider-swilling students that sat around us - not a care in the world - on the Kingston riverbank. 

The gig started at what time, 1040! That's late for a school night and how would we get home to SW11 when the trains stopped running at half-eleven... Night bus it seemed. 

Once George came on stage though, everything stopped. I had known that the album was great... song after song after song that had an addictive riff, a poetic lyric and Mr Ezra's deep, haunting yet joyful vocals powering throughout. But live was a different story... 

The room shivered as he played through his set, with just enough wry, mischievous chatter between. And what a treat to be so close, a mere four people back, we saw him in all his pretty, blonde, cheekboney glory adjusting his guitar strings, his voice enfolding us. 

Favourite songs of mine including, Blame It On Me, Leaving It Up To You and Cassy'O - about a watch by the way - were all played as well as obviously Budapest. The one everyone knew. 

It wasn't a long set, but it was perfectly executed. Consummate professional he is. "I'm leaving straight after this," he said, "straight on the road". Touring the UK, Festivals and then continental Europe towards the end of 2014. I did get the sense he was a little weary...not of the playing but the travel. 

Ne'er mind because the music makes up for it. Ezra reminds us of Dylan crossed with a 60s soul singer. He's folk with a dirty, dark edge in the lyrics. I fucking love him.

Buy the album (or stream it) and see him before he books the big venues. This boy needs a field or a small gropey club with a sticky bar.

We loved it all and happily got the night bus home when he finished, leaving the students to their shots and sex-searching...

georgeezra.com 

In Praise of Americana

Friday was the 4th of July, Independence Day, a celebration for Americans across the world. Generally as a fastidious cynical Brit there's plenty of things I like to criticise about our friends over the pond notably language, faux-positivity an geographical ignorance. However really the United States of America is a complex and astounding country that has given the world a lot of impressive objects, laws, celebrations and notable figures. In honour of the 4th July, here is my personal and current top 10 brilliant Yank things or people:

1) Attitude

Yes, yes, yes. Well done. You can. Congrats. The yanks are streets ahead of us in celebrating success. The clichéd and much maligned American dream is still woven into the fabric of the country. Every small town gal and guy can make their dreams come true and America praises them when they do. They're proud of their countrymen's success. 

Whilst there may be a lot to criticise about the American attitude towards various things, they rarely tear down and scorn the successful as we often do in Britain. Surely success should be encouraged (ungrit your teeth).

2) Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Country Music and Hoedowns

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, the man in black, drug addict, lover, prison reformer and epic songwriter and singer. I pine for his dark tones and languid lyrics. I do not recognise his world and yet I lap up the emotion he conveys. I want him.

Dolly Parton and her hoedown contemporaries are part of a genre that we will never have in GB, despite our recent bout of nu-folk bands. Oh how I yearn to journey to Nashville and dance in cowboy boots all night...

3) Denim

Levi's were the first, hard wearing clothing for the workers which have since become an international unform for hipster teens, weekend dads, chic oligarch wives and everything in between.

God bless America for making our lives easier...

4) Teen Drama TV

Not sure if I would have got through the relative vanilla-mess of my Home Counties adolescence without Dawson, Jen, Joey, Pacey, Ryan, Marisa, Brooke, Lucas, Chuck and Blair. Well in to my early twenties these kids had my heart and the wardrobes I wanted. Why did public school boys from Guildford not have the rippling abs of Ryan or the deft wit of Seth, the sexiness of Chuck. Why didn't we have jocks and keg parties and incredible vocabularys...

In "teen-drama" land if you drunk a few drinks every Saturday, you were probably an alcoholic, the boys next door were cute (they NEVER are) and it was quite normal for close friends to die or have sex with your boyfriends...I bloody miss them and their prematurely 30-year-old acerbic wit...

(*side note: also weird how the actors playing their parents were probably about five years older than some of them)

5) ScarJo

Yes, I know her parents are Danish and Russian or something similar, but she is seen as the modern classic American sex symbol, and she is. At the top of my #girlcrush list... there are little who rival that blonde bombshell look. She makes some good films too... but to be honest I just stare at her face.

6) Hollywood and Films

This could be seen to be a tad wide perhaps.. but the USA is the centre of the film industry, the championer of the Talkie, the location of the famous Hollywood Hills. Some of the best movies in the world ever have been made there.. and some more of the best have been funded by money that comes from there.

I can't really write too much about films without being terribly sweeping and I love too many. So I'm not going to, but you get my point.

7) Martin Luther King

 “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”

8) New York City

  There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone Beauvoir

I lived in New York when I was 19 in 2005 for three months with one of my best friends. 

We had a tiny apartment in East Village that was infested with mice, we had no TV and lived on Chips Ahoy and Reeses Pieces. By day we interned at an advertising company and a photography studio. At night and at the weekend, we walked and shopped and explored. We only walked though, we had no idea how to use public transport.. occasionally at night we'd shell for a taxi. We blagged our way with terrible fake ids and the most British accents we could manage into clubs: Duvet, Marquee, Bungalow 8 and then stood silently staring at everyone, impossibly glamourous American everyones. And there we were in our peasant skirts and coin belts weighed down by beads, as was the way.

We snuck into gallery openings and drunk all the free wine. One time we stayed up all night dancing in the W Hotel basement and then later in The Coffee Shop with some boys from New Jersey who bought us club sandwiches and champagne. 

Us in NYC, 2005

We stalked the Olsen Twins, devouring US Weekly and the like to try and guess where we could run in to them. We bought so many clothes that we couldn't afford. We stared at ground zero sadly. We watched live music in little dive bars in Greenwich Village and skipped down the street at midnight singing Downtown by Petula Clark..

The thing is... we just weren't aware. We knew we were lucky, but we weren't aware how lucky.

New York is beautiful city, an impossible city, a city that deafens you and hurls you around. It is in your face you see, but it's also layered and witty and clever. And small enought to really know. And big enough to hide. And you can just walk everywhere, which I love.

9) F Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

20th Century American literature has always been one of my favourite eras. I just loved what they were searrching for, Fitzgerald, Williams, Salinger, Miller, Walker, Kerouac, Lee and then later, Palahnuik and Morrison etc etc etc. It was so different to everything I ever read before when I started reading it at 16. It was so about the now and the future and little to do with the past... It was so about the pressures of success and who belonged. What made one acceptable or a decent person. Racism, Sexism, Capitalism it was all so exciting it burned me up inside and kept me searching for more from over-the-pond.

This may be another too-wide reaching paragraph. But it's true.

10) Computers and Social Media

Bill Gates; Steve Jobs; Marc Zuckerberg; Jack Dorsey... I salute them all...

Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit at Hackney Empire

Johnny Flynn at Hackney Empire

I'm still learning how to get these posts out on time, it is a struggle with work being so busy, hence this post being over a week late. I went to see Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit at the Hackney Empire on 10th October 2013.

I have been a fan of Johnny Flynn's deep poetic tones since 2008, when his first full length album, A Larum was released. Since then I have seen him a full five times prior to this, twice on his own (Transgressive Records in Shoreditch and Shakespeare's Globe this year) and three times with his band The Sussex Wit (Union Chapel, Shepherd's Bush and this year's Gentleman of the Road Stopover with Mumford, The Vaccines, Edward Sharpe et al). I've even blogged about him before at The London Word. So it is safe to say I am not a newbie to his gigs or admirable musicality. This time I trekked to Hackney - three tubes from work followed by two night buses home - to hear him perform a set which including many songs from his new album: Country Mile.

Along with the only friend who really indulges my love for the "modern folk rock" and its many relations, we were of course late and arrived mid way through the performance of the second of his support acts, Marika Hackman. A slip of a girl who looked about twelve and had the suitable uncomfortable-on-stage air so much favoured by the folk/singer-songwriter types because "it's about the music" you know. Apparently she's an ex-Burberry model and childhood friend of the rarely pictured Miss Cara Delevingne. Her voice when we listened following a hurried trip to the bar was extremely special, a softer strummier version of the girl from new indie pop sensation London Grammar. Her lyrics were poetic, straying to quite dark... definitely one to watch...

Later, Johnny strolled on stage accompanied by his usual bunch of sartorial misfits The Sussex Wit including his female backing singer/pianist/flautist/accordion player etc, his sister, Lily who I actually went to school with for two years when I was 11. I remember playing opposite her in a adapted musical version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - even then she had a hauntingly beautiful voice. Talented family.

As usual as well, Johnny stood in the midst of a circle of various instruments which I knew would be exchanged throughout the set as he showed that genuine musicality that I mentioned before. His band the Sussex Wit include, not only his sister Lillie on vocals, flute and accordion but also David Beauchamp on bass, Adam Beach on drums, Joe Zeitlin on cello and Cosmo Sheldrake (also the first support act that we missed) on keyboard.

The set rambled merrily through old favourites such as Brown Trout Blues,The Box and the The Wrote and the Writ from first album, A Larum and Been Listening, Howl and The Water from Been Listening. He interspersed well-known songs with new ones from Country Mile.

Preffered tracks of mine from the new album included the title track, Country Mile - apparently about walking according to Johnny and a very "country" folk record in the old American sense with a lot of twangy guitar behind the catchy, repetitive chorus. Murmuration (def: an act or instance of murmuring), slower dream-like and more poetic Johnny "I dreamt I flew with the saints last night/I know them all by wing size/And up there it just doesn’t count for naught/Whether you’re clever or wise" - I do appreciate a good poetic lyric. I've heard the sweet sound of Einstein's Idea - Johnny's lullaby for his son - before performed live and always like it. My favourite new track though had to be Fol-de-rol, which as Johnny explained referenced the bands love for South American folk music and Chicha; psychedelic Peruvian music from the 60’s/70’s. It stays true to the band's musicality and Johnny's earthy tones, but builds to rollicking chorus with some great male harmonising that certainly made my friend and I stamp our feet very un-surreptitiously amongst the well-behaved, serene audience.

If you are not a nu-folk/folk rock/ Flynn fan already I would generally advise starting with A Larum as it is probably his most "popular" work, but personally I am a great fan of Country Mile. Whilst Flynn and his band were never going to make an album that was a significantly different sound from the others, I do feel that Country Mile is more upbeat and positive than Been Listening and goes back to the twangy, memorable chorus's found on A Larum, whilst the philosophical lyrics never fail to pique thought.

As a live act, Johny Flynn & the Sussex Wit are a must-see in my book. Rarely is so much musicality seen on stage; Johnny himself plays the banjo, trumpet, mandolin, guitar, fiddle - and I'm sure others that I didn't notice. The band really feel one and other in the way that only comes from years together and constant jamming on the road and whenever they can just because they enjoy it. I would see them again and again. Going to their gigs makes me want to move to North East London marry a guitar player and become a whisky-drinking poet... aaahh if only....

Images (c) (1)Annabel Cameron and (2)Wunmi Onibudo on Flickr