Reviews
Artists: Winterlude
Venue: Conway Hall
Town: London
Date: 19th Feb
Website:
http://www.thebetsey.com/
The Betsy Trotwood is one of the better pubs in London, good beer, nice people and live music most nights of the week in either the tiny upstairs room or the equally tiny basement. The upside of this is that they are able to put on purely acoustic nights (no amplification at all) there is an obvious problem when at least half the bands you book for an all day festival could fill your venue three or four times over. So, in the manner of someone realising that they could not get all their friends into their one bed flat, they held their party somewhere larger - in this case Conway Hall.
Any gig that has The Cedars on the bill has got to be a good one. The acoustic four piece, apart from forgetting the words to a cover (we never did find out what it was) did not put a foot wrong in their set of bluesy country songs. In lead singer Chantelle Hill they have someone that little bit special and I guess the only reason they opened is because they are an acoustic act.
They were certainly worthy of being above The Benjamin Folke Thomas Band whose basic country rock was, at best, functional. The component parts of drums, bass and guitars were all perfectly acceptable but Thomas was unable to stamp his persona and if there had have been another stage I would have wandered over to it too see what else was going on.
The Treetop Flyers were the band I was looking forward to seeing as they were the only ones that I had not seen before. The Treetop Flyers have a sound that moves between the bluesy southern rock of The Allman Brothers Band and west coast harmonies of Crosby Stills Nash and Young without sounding like copyists. I only made one visit to the merchandise stall and it was to buy anything that they had for sale.
I don't know how long ago it was I last saw John Otway; it may have been ten years ago, it may have been longer and what was a little surprising was not that the set list seemed to be stuck in time; 'Really Free', 'Delilah' (from the weetabix advert) 'House of the Rising Sun' (audience participation) but that he still does forward rolls and dives off a set of steps that I would think twice about climbing. Otway's set is polished, it is slick, and it is scripted but without seeming so. There were parts that were laugh out loud, such as his shirt ripping moment on the "International Rock Anthem" 'We Rock' and I really shouldn't leave it as long before seeing him again.
It was a bit of a mystery why The Rockingbirds were not headlining. They may only have had released two albums 'The Rockingbirds' and 'Whatever Happened to The Rockingbirds' in the five years they were together in the first half of the nineties and may have only been back together for a couple of years since the Heavenly Records eighteenth birthday shows but they left an indelible stamp on anyone interested in alt-country. Their performances of 'Jonathan, Jonathan', 'Searching' and 'Time Drives the Truck' were just perfect examples of their craft.
It would need someone special to follow The Rockingbirds and I was not sure that Danny and the Champions of the World was up to it. Much as I enjoyed last year's album 'Streets of Our Time' it was not really headline material. But this was a new Danny George Wilson, a new band of World Champions, and a completely new set of songs. This may have seemed like arrogance, except I do not believe that Wilson has an arrogant bone in his body. He gave a performance that was so tight, so together that it was almost impossible to believe that it had not been honed by playing a couple of hundred shows a year of the past decade, it was a performance that was Springsteenesque in it's delivery and it will surely catapult Wilson to much bigger things.
All at Winterlude witnessed the beginning of something great and, in the future, people will lie about being there.
John The Jacket Hawes