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Steve Earle

Venue: Royal Festival Hall
Town: London
Date: 21st May
Website: http://www.steveearle.com

The first question is, how many guitars? There were like, literally, millions of them - well, OK, not literally millions but when you factor in the mandolins and fiddles to go with the acoustic and electric guitars (basses don't count - Kelly Looney had his own stash of those on the other side of the stage) plus two banjos which prompted a couple of banjo jokes "why don't you see banjos in Star Trek? Because it's the future" - I do love a banjo joke, not because I hate banjos, because I hate ukuleles and such jokes are adaptable.

The problem with having so many stringed instruments at your disposal is that you're gonna want to play them and this means a guitar tech coming on stage between most songs, which in turn disrupts the flow of the performance and extended periods of continuity were few and far between. Maybe the performance was tailored to suit the venue. The Royal Festival Hall is not my favourite place. It's comfortable, punctual and polite. Good things if you are there for a classical evening (it is the home to four orchestras) but too stifling for a rock gig. And that, essentially, is what Earle still delivers. This is a rock performance with country instruments and protest songs.

Earle is still as angry as ever. The Low Highway, his latest album, is a social commentary on the world today. He acknowledges that people like him are just copying the job done by Bob Dylan, who was just copying the job done by Woody Guthrie. The difference now, he opines, is that only now do we see what Guthrie saw, only now are we living through a depression. The Low Highway provides, and rightly so, the backbone of this gig. He opened the show with the title track and also played 21st Century blues, Calico County, After The Mardi Gras, and the incendiary Burnin' it down. You could have easily replaced 'Wal-Mart' with 'Tesco' in that song but you can't help but feel most of the audience would have been concerned about their clubcard points.

As this was a two hour gig there was plenty of room for old favorites; Copperhead Road, My Old Friend the Blues, Guitar Town (which included Earle, Looney and Chris Masterson strutting to the very edge of the stage but of course there was only a gap between them and the front row seats not a horde of fans wearing non replica Copperhead Road tee shirts stretching their arms upwards hoping to touch the great man) and Some Day.

Earle said that this was the best band that he had ever played with - a bold statement from someone who released his first EP over thirty years ago. You can see and hear why though. There is a solidity about the rhythm section of Looney and drummer Will Rigby and multi-instrumentalists and vocalists The Mastersons (Chris and his wife Elanor Whitmore) can do the work of four, or more. They allow for the effortless movement between songs from all stages of Earles career. This could have been the gig of the year, really it could but the venue slowly drained the life from it.

"Where you work and where you play / Where you lay your money down / What you do and what you say / The revolution starts now". Possibly not from the comfy seats though.

John 'The Jacket' Hawes