If heaven exists it's a pair of train tracks
Published on Fri 22 Apr 2011
It's been another music-filled few days. On Friday, on a bit of a whim, I went to see Simone Felice at The Haymakers. The support act was Polly Paulusma who I remember reading a lot about and seeing once at Glastonbury back in the day. I got the impression it was her first gig in a while but any nerves were confined to the charming in between song talky bits. It's the first time I've seen anyone using a vocal harmoniser live, and it would've worked better than I could ever imagine a vocal harmoniser working if it had been a tiny bit quieter in the mix. Let's hope they don't become the next loop pedal.
Simone Felice was just amazing - he was the drummer in The Felice Brothers (who are excellent too) until he left to form his own band The Duke and The King a year or two ago. I can't imagine how just one guy and a guitar could get all that much better. He also looks a lot like Austin from erstwhile Cambridge band The Winter Kings. "Don't Wake The Scarecrow" which is probably my favourite Felice Brothers song (I guess it was one of his eh?) had my spine tingling the entire time. The only slightly odd moments were when he stopped a song to tell someone in the front row to either shut up or get out (fair enough though!) and when he said "I feel blessed to be here because it's less than a year ago that I had open heart surgery" and everyone in the room gasped as one. I guess nobody else knew either. He's only 34. Anyway, excellent gig. I bought (a review copy of) his book, which he did a little reading from and sounded pretty good, but I'm unlikely to start it any time soon because
Wolf Hall
I also saw Josh Ritter at The Scala on Tuesday night - it was excellent. As lovely as the Barbican gig was last year, there's not much that can't be improved by not being at The Barbican. The sound was spot on - incredibly full - and his band are so, so tight. They also have one of the best keyboard players I've seen - really impressive on the odd occasion when it's appropriate, but generally very restrained and all about the song. Still no Temptation of Adam, but I love pretty much all of his stuff and the new songs sound great too. He has to be the most joyful performer about, which is very nice to see.
The sound wasn't spot on for support act John Smith (who supported the Broken Family Band at The Portland a while ago) - his guitar completely cut out after the first song. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to him though as he took it with good grace and it got everyone behind him. He's a bit less English folk sounding than I remembered and has gone in a bit of a Ray Lamontagne direction, vocally at least, but he sounded good. Had a nice line in deadpan banter too, borrowing the "I'm not happy" "oh, which one are you?" dwarf joke from whichever politician it was the other month.
In other news I sent Trinkets and Offcuts off to be mastered a couple of days ago and the first pass sounds really nice. I'd have been happy to use that but the engineer, in a turnaround from every other mastering person I've worked with, listened again the next day and has a few more improvements he wants to make. If you want someone who really cares about what he's doing, you could do a lot worse than Eric at Philosopher's Barn...