Tinariwen, Oran Mor, 5/4/12

Tinariwen

Tinariwen are a desert blues band with a rebel Tuareg sensibility that is confrontational, challenging and ultra-hip.  There are lots of myths about them fighting across the southern Sahara, AK47 in one hand, electric guitar in the other.  Much of that may be apocryphal, but I still like to think I’ve never been in a room with more dangerous men.

They are the very antithesis of a Western band, a million miles away from bare-chested swaggering pomp rockers who are all about the ego.  Swathed in their Tuareg robes, their heads and faces largely covered, they are definitely a collective, regularly rotating to share lead guitar and vocal duties.

They are masters of that fractured guitar riff that characterises the desert blues sound.  Communication with the audience is minimal – someone shouts out thanks in French to them, speaking for the whole audience – but the music is more than enough.  Someone once said John Travolta dances as if his nuts were on wheels: this is the kind of groove that makes you feel that way.

Lots of the numbers are excellent, but I’m really here just for one:  “Tenhert” is a fantastic, hypnotic, ice-cold sliver of Arab rap that is just irresistible.  One of the coolest songs on the planet, it’s worth the entrance money alone.  It sets my wheels in motion, and I don’t stop for the rest of the night.  Great stuff.

Joan as Police Woman, Oran Mor, 11/2/11

Joan Wasser

An electric set as opposed to the acoustic session I last saw, Joan as Police Woman genuinely seems to enjoy playing Oran Mor, and the venue enjoys it right back at her.

“The Deep Field” is the new album she’s showcasing, and it’s typically edgy and raucous, and manages to be very danceable but very left field at the same time.  It’s a trick she does exceptionally well, especially in  “The Magic”, which is sensuous and erudite and hipswaying all at once, while “Run For Love” is wild and beautifully distorted.  She also does a cracking, full-throated version of “Save Me” from her first album.  But she changes pace at the flick of a switch: “Flash” – which she previewed last time – is here restrained, like having a  sexual itch while being strapped up in a straitjacket, and she is at her most wistful on “Forever and a Year”.

There are a couple of less successful numbers – “Eternal Flame” is a remarkably complex melody and doesn’t quite hit the mark – and early in the set the sound balance is all wrong, drowning that fantastic voice of hers.  She also encores with two ballads, leaving the feeling that the evening could have ended with a real high point: there are cries for “Christobel” and, while I’m sure she’s fed up playing it, it would have sent the audience out on twinkle toes.  However, she’s more than worth seeing again and again, especially if she continues to flirt with the audience while dressed in slash-backed leather jumpsuits and kitten heels.

Mmmm… kitten heels….

Astrid Williamson / Joe Pernice, Oran Mor, 27/1/10

 

Astrid Williamson

There’s no accounting for taste.  While I’m sure Sandi Thom’s recent Celtic Connections gig would have drawn a respectable crowd, three men and a dog turn up to see the wonderful Astrid Williamson support Joe Pernice.

Formerly the lead singer of Goya Dress, she’s just released her fourth solo album, “Here Come the Vikings”, and this is a  rare visit to Glasgow – the last time I saw her here was in support of Michael Bolton (rest assured, I didn’t stay for his part of the concert!) in 2007. Since then, she’s been having long overdue success in the States, and it seems to be doing her good:  she’s more beautiful than ever, she’s relaxed and charming and her voice is in great form.  She’s at the piano tonight, which limits the repertoire a little; she apologises for turning down my requests for songs that rely on a band, but I forgive her since she makes up for it with “True Romance”, one of the sultriest songs I’ve ever heard (“Think of this, all my tangled hair across your hips…”).  

She also manages a fantastic version of “Glorious” from her Goya Dress days, and some great new numbers (I can’t remember ever hearing Charlie Chaplin name-checked in a  song before).  Apparently she has a load of piano-driven songs she doesn’t know what to do with:  I’d suggest a piano-driven album, then. 

She says it’s great to be back in Glasgow: that’s very gracious of her given she’s treated with such disinterest by a Glasgow public who obviously don’t care much for perfection.  It’s just not fair. 

Headliner Joe Pernice has a sweet voice and a wicked way with lyrics: this time it’s a name-check for Leni Riefenstahl, and a line like “I’d kiss your ass just to kiss your ass again” deserves some kind of an award.  He’s obviously hugely talented - he’s just published his first novel – but there’s a sameness about the performance that has me deciding on an early night.   Astrid’s in the CD player on the way home.

Nerina Pallot, “The Graduate” / Oran Mor, 7/10/09

Nerina Pallot

At first glance, Nerina Pallot appears like any other popette doing the rounds at the moment.  She’s beautiful – very – and kooky and MOR friendly.  She’s perfect for Radio 2 listeners on the drive to work each morning (her new single, “Real Late Starter”, was the station’s record of the week recently), and she appears to embody a sweet, girl-next-door image.  In other words, okay, but not exactly a musical genius.

There’s a lot more to her than that, though. First of all, she’s quite a bit older than the current crop of girly singers – she’s in her mid thirties, not her early twenties – and has therefore been around the block a bit, which is no bad thing for a songwriter’s credibility.  Secondly, she has a fierce independent streak, not of the faux ladette type so common now (so common now) but a real, feisty commitment to doing things her way, and damn the consequences.    Her new album, “The Graduate” is the second she’s produced on her own Idaho label, after all sorts of nonsense that saw her first album pulled for her refusal to accept Polydor’s heavy handed influence in her sound: indeed, the new single is clearly a statement of free will ( “I’m the Queen Refusenik / if I was somebody you’d be kissing my ass right now…” ), and similar feistiness is apparent in several tracks, such as “When did I Become Such a Bitch”.

The new album is perhaps a bit of a slow burner: there’s nothing as immediately arresting as “Idaho” or “Sophia” from her second album, “Fires”, though “It Was Me” is a smashing crooner’s number (I’d love to hear Sinatra do it, but that’s never going to happen now), and “It Starts” is a gorgeous torch song.  However, it bears repeated plays quite happily, with excellent production, catchy riffs and hummable tunes.  If possible, get the special double edition, with a second disc of acoustic versions of some of the tracks; stripped down, many of them work even better. It’s also a good idea to have a look at her video diary at http://www.nerinapallot.com/ , which has some terrific alternative versions of the album’s new songs.

Live, she’s charming, of course, with a nice line in self-deprecation and personal revelation: she delights the audience when talking about her low boredom threshold, suddenly remembering her husband, who she married within weeks of their first date.  “He doesn’t need to worry,” she says, with a mixture of wistfulness and lust.  She also freely admits to “cutting down on the sauce”, recounting her first King Tut’s gig when, plastered on a half bottle of Scotch, she wondered for a second if that was what it felt like to be John Martyn.

It’s a great wee show.  The audience demographic – everything from adolescent girls to hairy blokes even older than me – speaks of a wide appeal to real fans.   Pallot’s voice is sweet, sure, but it has real virtuosity, particularly in the upper registers, and is so far removed from the likes of the paper thin Mockney warblings of Lily Allen.  She’s also a fine musician, especially on keyboards: she’s more than up to the barnstorming, piano-driven Elton John medley with which  she finishes the main set (inspired, she claims, by her failure to perpetuate the rumour that she is the secret love child of Elton and Kiki Dee through her Wikipedia page). There are a couple of dips – “Everybody’s Going to War” could perhaps do with the oomph another guitar would give it – but all in all, everyone has a fantastic time.  In the encore, she finishes with “Sophia”, which has become a bit of an anthem for her fans, with all the positive and negative implications that has: if it wasn’t for the smoking ban, you just know every cigarette lighter in the place would be waved unironically at the stage.  But the reception it receives is tumultuous, indicating a real affection for Pallot, who responds by bursting into tears.

A lovely girl, and a class act.

Joan as Police Woman, Oran Mor, 2/10/09

Joan as Police Woman

I’ve never really got Antony and the Johnsons. Hegarty has, to be sure, a rare and beautiful voice, but all that emoting all over the place just leaves me kinda cold; I once tried to count the number of times the word “cry” and variations thereof are used on his latest album, “The Crying Light”, and had to give up.  Added to that is the whiff of elitism, of avant garde exclusivity,  that permeates some of his work and that of his acolytes, such as the seriously deranged but oddly compelling Coco Rosie, that doesn’t sit easily with a blue-collar-bred West of Scotland boy like me.  I expect him to be Anthony, and to front The Johnstones.

One time Johnson Joan Wasser, though, I do get.  What appeals to me most is her pop sensibility, heard clearly in the perfect riffs of the sublime “Christobel” – a song that makes your nuts want to dance if ever there was one and if you happen to have them – and “I Defy”, in which she duets with Hegarty. Neither of these songs from her first album, “Real Life”, appear tonight, nor does “Start of My Heart“,  doing the rounds on YouTube with it’s gorgeous Sinead O’Connor-like video;  but just to establish her pop princess credentials, second up in the set is a cover of Britney Spears’ “Overprotected”, and the opportunities to dance come thick and fast thereafter.

Then there’s that voice.  It’s a magnificent and rich instrument of real soul and fuck knows how many octaves.  Given full reign in “Fire” or “Save Me”, it’s nakedly sexual, while growling and wailing through Iggy Pop’s “Baby” reveals its malicious possibilities. But it’s probably at its most arresting when it’s used sparingly and with precision: “The Human Condition” and, especially, “Flash” are so restrained and perfect any extraneous noise might shatter them.  She is capable of immense delicacy.

She lets nothing stand in the way of the music, either.  Just her, Timo Ellis and an hissy 4-track cassette machine that refuses to sanitise the experience (she describes its sound  “Like skin” to a delighted audience).  This is down and dirty stuff.  And all the better for it.

There are a couple of misses amongst the hits, and glitches with the technology that stilt the early numbers.  However, as the boorish Oran Mor staff try to rush her off stage and clear the hall for the no doubt equally boorish nightclub to take her place, Wasser finishes with an experience much like being hit in a nice way with a baseball bat.  She was Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend at the time of his death in 1997 and joining Antony and the Johnsons in 1999, she says, saved her life.  I wouldn’t dare to presume that that backstory informs her performance of “Keeper of the Flame”, but something very, very poignant is going on.  Accompanied by her guitar and a stunning baritone ukulele solo by Ellis, it is the most unutterably beautiful vocal performance I have ever heard by anyone, anywhere, anytime.   That good.