This is the response I got from, well, everybody when telling them I was going to see a gig at MilkwoodJam. Possibly the nicest gig venue in Swansea is completely unknown, largely due to a total lack of publicity for the place. Unless your day to day life takes you past the venue’s ground floor entrance wedged between clothes shops and a casino, there are very few other ways you would hear about gigs there. MilkwoodJam can boast, however, of being really quite a nice place, and hence word-of-mouth is spreading. I was dragged along to check out the venue a couple of months ago by a friend to see a rather sub-standard band that had come all the way to Swansea from 1992, and may have been related in some way to the Corrs. The music was… interesting, but the venue is pretty neat. So it was pretty easy for Steve to convince me to go along to see Foy Vance supported by Thom Stone last night. The gig was an exercise in how the traditional soulful-voice/acoustic-guitar and little else can be carried out in very different ways.
A figure stumbled out from back stage and stood by the bar. Pete leaned over to me. “What do you reckon he’s one of the acts?” Beneath a huge mop of hair that made him look like a rejected member of the Kooks and in a tank-top that could have been passed down through generations of the Stone family, Thom was ordering a drink. Maybe it was his shuffling feet, or maybe it was his playful but nervous grin that stopped him looking like the kind of painful scenester that bounces along on the front row of whichever gig NME is promoting that week.
Pretty soon Thom was on stage with his guitar. Simple chords, simple song structures, simple melodies, and whole heaps of honesty, talent, and soul. Each song was punctuated with a quick bob of a bow, a thank you, and a few seconds of him rearranging his hair into the same wind-tunnel-resident look. Admittedly when he started playing, my instant reaction was “Oh, no, not another one”, but after a few minutes of bluesy, folky, heartfelt and above all British talent, I was hooked. If Matt Costa was English, he’d be Thom Stone.
Next up was Foy Vance, who’s tunes you have probably heard during down tempo moments of every TV Drama on at the moment. The Irishman emerged with his guitar, and introduced himself before breaking into his first song. His voice was that of a large gospel singer trapped in a small Irishman’s body; deliciously raspy and absolutely huge. He alternated songs with just him and a guitar, with songs where he would record loops live of his guitar, beat boxing, backing vocals and keyboard, and then proceed to sing the main vocals over the wonderful cacophony he had just singlehandedly created. The first time he did this, it was surprising original, the second time it gimmicky, and before long he was getting out a violin bow to use on his acoustic, and plugging his custom Telecaster into an amp the size (and shape) of a grapefruit. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this kind of showmanship, and what he did was very clever, but the songs, and especially his voice are strong enough to be breathtaking without all the toys. I would have preferred to have seen him with a full band, keeping the music raw. But on a small-ish UK tour a drummer and bass player would have tripled the costs. My full respect goes out to any acoustic act that takes a laptop on stage with them, and uses it without becoming cheesey at any time, and amongst the electronics and over-rehearsed pedal-stomping, Foy’s voice and songs where what rang out to his audience. How he created his sound became unimportant in comparison to what he was creating.
Check out their myspaces here and here, and see if you can catch the rest of the tour.
0 comments:
Post a Comment