nixsight

Not going to be able to write this up as well as it deserves, but if I don’t write a few things about the gig last night right now, I never will.

[edited to add: Though both Rol and Swiss Toni do better - and more uplifting - jobs here and here.]

It’s actually last-last night, now, technically. There, that’s a useless fact that you get for free.

My thoughts on the gig after the jump. If you were at the gig, or know the venue, or have any comments at all, as always they are most welcome!

Support was ably given by the fun – and very beardy – US Rock-Folk artist Otis Gibbs. There’s lots of stuff to listen to and look at at his website: http://otisgibbs.com/.
The sound of his voice and his lovely guitar totally took you somewhere else – albeit, y’know, somewhere a bit earthier and more American – though as Girl One pointed out afterward, there was a formulaic element to his songs, and a repetitious air to each one.

Having said that – and this goes for Billy Bragg too – I don’t think the Guildhall, and that audience, are really the venue or crowd with which such acts excel, and the whole time we were listening to Gibbs, I felt like a smaller, more atmospheric venue, with a crowd eager to sing along, is where the performance would really make the most sense.
The reason folk and other People’s (big “P” mine, but utterly required) music contains that repetition is because it is a music that gains strength through being sung communally.

Whereas the Guildhall is an echo-chamber, and encourages the sort of audience that is more about being seen to be the loudest supporter of an act, or to talk the most loudly in the poorly placed, badly isolated bars, than about sharing in a musical experience.

Which of course is an unfair generalisation about the audience there. Most of them – probably ourselves included – were extremely polite and reserved individuals who just love a good singer-songwriter. Which, you know, has it’s pitfalls at such a gig – or any gig – more about which later – especially when much of Bragg’s catalogue is protest music, and encourages some misbehaviour and dissent.

But the problem with a seated show in a place like the Guildhall is that it only takes a few – literally five or six total arses – to seriously put a crimp in everybody else’s show. From where we were sitting, there was a point early on where in the quieter moments on some of Gibb’s songs, we could very clearly hear a guy talking loudly to his friend in the doorway to the bar area, on the other side of the venue.
Though I say we could clearly hear him – as far as I could tell, his whole vocabularly consisted of the sound “Haw haw” at varying levels of volume.

More of a problem once the gig started was a guy across the way and just back from us, who insisted on playing up his fandom of Mr Bragg to his much quieter friend, by shouting “Billy!” loudly as close onto the somber bit of a slow song as possible, and raucously talking the line that Bragg was about to sing into his friend’s ear.

This didn’t wreck the gig, as it happens. Anyone who has been to the cinema with me may have been surprised to note that I was actually more amused than homicidal about the interruptions – but it bears mentioning.

(When I saw Sigur Ros at the same venue a couple of years back, it was more of an issue. The orchestral swells and ebbs, and surreal serenity of that band, was persistently knocked off-kilter for the audience by a group of guys who clearly thought that this was the kind of band that needed to be reminded of how awesome they were repeatedly mid-song, rather than actually fucking listening to them.)

Charlie Brooker nailed the particular phenomenon in the British populace in his recent bit on the Brand/Ross thing – though this is a slightly different strain. But basically, audiences are trained now to think that their input into the entertainment being presented is somehow as interesting as that of the act that people have paid to see.

Because they are twats.

Which all sounds a bit beyond the point when so much of Bragg’s ideology is about “the people” getting involved. And my cynicism may be getting in the way of fairly representing how I feel about that element of the show, so I should clarify:
There is something lovely – something utterly joyous – about an audience all acting as one, singing along, getting it wrong. Even fucking swaying in place, or moshing at the front – if that’s appropriate to the gig – and expressing their enjoyment of the community of that gig. Without, you know, being selfish dicks about it.

Bragg brings that out of his audience perfectly at many points in the show – though he coasts in a little at the head of it with some noisy crowd-pleasers that he doesn’t sound quite warmed up for.
Though success has allowed him the luxury of keeping his ideology burning hot, while his fan-base has turned old and become middle-class and safe, he keeps himself honest, poking fun at his own position and coming across as genuinely sincere in his love of performing, and of performing these songs in particular.

And he shines in between songs, with winning charm and funny anecdotes.
I’ve been listening to “Ingrid Bergman” half-heartedly for months, and you know, I don’t think I ever realised how utterly brilliant and filthy a song it is. Now I can’t wait for it to come back around on the playlist, and that’s down to Bragg’s explanation of the process behind it, and how very naughty a man Woody Guthrie, who wrote it, was.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, leaving “New England” and “Levi Stubb’s Tears” till the encore. Those are emotional songs for Bragg, and his audience, for any number of different reasons, and everybody is so emotionally exhausted and content once he plays them that trying to get any further songs out of him would seem frankly rude.

There’s nothing about Billy Bragg performances that I don’t enjoy – though for different reasons Girl One and I prickled a little at how absorbed he got talking about politics, if only twice (which is a massive improvement on the first time I saw him). For her, it was just generally the politics of it – not Bragg’s politics, as such, just the enthusiasm of it.

For me, it was that, as a speaker, Bragg is utterly absorbing, and has absolute command of his audience between songs – making me feel enthused about his talk about cynicism being the enemy, and how we should fight it despite the disappointing knocks we’ve had from our recent political history, even though I am an utterly cynical bastard.
But when he gets too into the political content of what he’s saying – and as I said, it only happened twice last night – it can be death at a venue like the Guildhall, with an audience like a Guildhall audience, happy to drop nearly twenty quid on tickets and a tenner on two drinks.
It’s not the sort of stage where a person can be on stage talking for more than a couple of minutes without saying anything funny and not start to look like… well, a person on stage talking without saying anything funny.

I hate that about the venue, actually, and about myself when I’m surrounded by a bustling mass of what I suppose are my peers, kinda.

Because the fact is, I’d actually love to have a few drinks with Billy Bragg and talk to him about how he feels about Tony Blair, what he thinks of the slow and seedy normalising of the BNP in the UK, and what really wins out between his pragmatism and his excitement at the importance of there being a black American president. Which, incidentally, are all things he touched on.

Actually, scratch that. I’d just love to have a few drinks with Billy Bragg. And now I think Girl One would, too.