#green note

Things are hotting up for Underhill Rose…

… the Asheville trio returned to the Green Note making good on their promise to come back in warmer times. After last November’s spellbinding but chilly candlelit show Eleanor Underhill, Molly Rose Reed and Salley Williamson shone brightly in Camden, where their audience basked in the sultry warmth of both the June evening and their scintillating set.

That set showed their versatility, from bluegrass like the breezy hypnotic bluegrass of Bare Little Rooms, Eleanor’s high clear vocal embellished with intertwining whoops and aahs, and the mellow Not Gonna Worry with its wordless train-whistle three-part harmonies, to old time stylings in Helpless Wanderer’s Paper Moon dustbowl country stomp, and the jaunty banjo-led rag of The End Of 27, Molly’s playful lead vocal backed by Eleanor and Salley's mute-trumpet-like wordless seventh textures. A spine-tingling three-part a cappella passage introduced their upbeat take on Richard M Jones’ 1920s blues Trouble In Mind, which featured stylish swapping of the lead part and slick two- and three-way vocal overlays, topped with another cracking unaccompanied glissando to the closing major.

The trio were joined by Charlie from support act Jonas and Jane (…it’s complicated) on pedal steel, adding a lush Crosby & Nash style 70s wash to the Big Sky anthem Montana. The slow and mellow love song Love Looks Good On You became even more Eagles-y with Charlie’s understated lines and Eleanor’s spare melancholic harp accents, closing in another delightful one, then two and finally three-part wordless melody. The pedal steel also worked well on White Rose, with its slightly tricksy rhythms and trad English folk harmonies lending a very Grateful Dead St Stephen feel, and even more so on a surprise cover of Ode To Billie Joe. Their hazy, moody take on Bobby Gentry’s classic featured gooseflesh-raising pedal steel swells, and the three voices linked to build the never-quite-resolved tension of the lyric, closing in a fantastic unison harmony with the guitar.

Another surprise cover was Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, which surprisingly worked as a stripped-back country number, Salley’s bass forming the backbone of the riff topped with Molly’s seductive voice. Salley herself took the vocal lead on These Boots Were Made For Walkin’ capturing that same mood of strangely menacing sass (oddly sassy menace?) as Nancy Sinatra did. Molly took a brief solo spot with Dublin Days, from a project recorded with her father, a folky number ideal for her expressive rich vocal, while Eleanor’s Youngian harp got another outing leading the deceptively light-hearted protest of Die In My Bones. After the steamy, breathy drawl harmonies of John Prine’s Long Monday the set closed with the velvety three-part country ode to ‘home’ of Little House.

Two encores came in the form of the 30s Southern gothic Whispering Pines Motel with its bittersweet New Orleans harmonies, and lastly (joined by Jonas and Jane) a stunning five-part relaxed take on Dylan’s I Shall Be Released.

"Si vous vous sentez seul quand vous êtes seul … 

… vous êtes en mauvaise compagnie”.

Plunger don't know if Sartre played guitar, but Mark Harrison can definitely do existentialism, so he may have had the Frenchman’s aphorism in mind at his show at the Green Note. After playing to a three-figure crowd near his new(ish) home in the Cotswolds he might have been a little disappointed at the turnout at his musical home (it being where he launched his career just over a decade ago) barely breaking double figures: but he took it very philosophically, “… we’re in the new music business where you can say, ‘the smaller the audience, the better the act.’”

Shockingly, Plunger last caught Mark live roughly around the time he left London for rural splendour four years ago, consequently this was our first show post-release of his excellent Road To Liberty Parts 1 & 2, from which much of the set was drawn (although not exclusively) delivered with the customary precision and aplomb by Mark, Charles Benfield (bass), and Ben Welburn (drums and percussion, including washboard).

With his usual dry understatement Mark confessed “I write songs about things other people don’t… although I’m not sure how good a thing that is!” With inspirations ranging from prison songs to industrial decline, from labour relations in 19th century America (sort of) to the unreliability of first impressions Plunger aren’t going to disagree. Despite his kaleidoscopic spectrum of subjects, Mark’s songs possessed a stylistic unity that goes beyond the constraints of the minimalist palette of instrumentation: almost exclusively with a light-touch upbeat tempo, to Plunger’s ears at least, they do conjure the early 20th century performers who are his inspiration, playing on New Orleans street corners, at Sunday social picnics or rural backporch get-togethers, where dancing and enjoyment were the order of the day. Let’s face it, after a hard day in the fields or the factories no one wants to hear someone moaning on about how awful life is, and in Plunger’s mind’s eye these were just the ticket to get your spats, work boots, or bare feet moving (or in our case, creaking gently to and fro on the venue’s old bentwood chairs). Epitomising this were the crisp beat of Go Nice with its heartbeat bass, the happy-go-lucky washboard-driven bounce of House Full Of Children, the delicate-but-wistful cake-walk of Wheels Going Round, and the light (almost playground) rag of Everybody Knows.

Which isn’t to say there was no complexity or darker moments: the earthy, blues slide-led Skip’s Song hinting at the subject’s less than sunny disposition; the chugging riff and tom-heavy drums (“Bo Diddley plays 12-string!”) of The Biggest Fool, and the ticking train-track hi-hat and off-kilter picking of Passing Through being good examples. Clever arrangements too evoked particular atmospheres - Ben and Charles’ drum/slapped bass-body rock-breaking SFX in Doin’ Time; John The Chinaman’s guitar-and-bass spike-driving ‘clanks’; the growing intensity in Everybody Knows reflecting the exasperation of the lyric; and a mesmeric repetitive hook and busy rim-shot-and-snare-roll drums lent a fittingly tense undercurrent to Panic Attack.

Charles and Ben’s contributions were always well-judged, not overpowering the frontman, and both had solo spots on Biggest Fool and Same Roads to demonstrate their chops. Mark’s performance was exemplary: highly dextrous finger-picking (even on 12-string!) from backwoods rusticity on Doin’ Time to musical-box intricacy in Wheels Going Round; and Delta slide-guitar of the highest order, including a very echt solo in Skip’s Song; plus some tricksy timings and emphases as on Black Dog Moan and the Featish Big Mary’s House. Mark’s vocal too fits the impromptu juke joint vibe of the material, his not exactly spoken but unhistrionic delivery often having a sardonic or weary edge depending on the song. The intricacy of the playing being due, as he told us, to his having written many of his songs as instrumentals, “I was sort of modelling myself on the great John Fahey, he played old folk and blues songs instrumentally, his idea was you didn’t need the words as the guitar playing was so good. So I wrote all these things as though they were instrumentals which is why they’re so damn hard to play and sing at the same time… and that’s the reason i don’t smile, i’m concentrating.”

And that of course is the other sine qua non of a Mark Harrison show: the drier-than-a-Jacob’s-cracker-dipped-in-manzanilla-in-the-Sahara wit of his inter-song introductions, asides and aperçus. Plunger haven’t actually done the numbers (that would be obsessional) but reckon at least half the show must have consisted of these, and highly entertaining they were as always. Particular Plunger favourites included: 

“This time last week we played in an amphitheatre in the Cotswolds to an audience of over 300 people, all of whom think paying £20 for a carrot is perfectly reasonable…”

“One of the themes in blues music - proper blues music, not the stuff done by people pulling faces and making loud noises on the electric guitar - is prison songs.” 

“I haven’t been to prison myself, but I have done a speed awareness course, and that was enough for me, it was a brutal experience, in which retired ex-coppers sneered at you for hours upon hours it seemed, then when I came out I’d got a parking ticket. This is all true: I can’t make stuff up, because reality is awful enough.”

“I do a lot of observing doing this in various places, and what I observe has no value whatsoever: like everyone else I form my opinions from the briefest impressions with no idea at all if they’re accurate. So I will confidently tell you that a place we’ve played is ‘crap’ or ‘nice’ entirely based on whether I could park or not…”

“Everybody Knows - a series of things everybody knows… but apparently that a lot of people can’t accept which is one of the reasons why there are so many pains in the arse out there…”

“It’s about how you might feel when you become an adult, should that ever happen. It does seem to be something that can be postponed almost indefinitely these days, another reason why so many people are pains in the arse, in my opinion…”

“I was never very good with relationships mainly because I was never aware I was in them. One person I disappointed was a fine girl from Birmingham called ‘Shirl’, who used to go round with an enormous handbag with nothing in it, but a bottle of Jack Daniels… where are these people now when you need them?!”

“This is from a book I read, called Juke Joints Of The Mississippi (I’m sure you all have it at home and it’s a regular Christmas gift for your nearest and dearest) about the primitive bars set up in shacks and the like on the outskirts of towns… yes, very much like this place, I’d say this place was a juke joint with A levels. There they’d drink the hooch supplied by the owner, which might turn out to be poison (although it almost certainly wasn’t ten quid a pint) and they’d dance in a way we might regard as ‘vigourous’ and sometimes shoot each other. We’ve played in places where we really have wanted people to shoot each other and it hasn’t happened yet, and we’re profoundly disappointed…”

“It’s about what life was like before happiness was invented: happiness was invented some time in the 1980s I think, much too late to reach us growing up in Coventry. The very concept was alien, I think there might have been a bye-law against smiling: certainly we regarded people who smiled a lot with enormous suspicion, and I think that is in fact the CORRECT attitude.”

“Not sure how many times you’ll go out and hear someone say ‘here’s a song about British social history in the 1950s’…”

“There are people who expect to be in a state of high excitement 24 hours a day: strangely enough these are often some of the dullest people you’ve ever met…” 

“I did an impersonation of a normal person that I thought was quite convincing but in the end I came up short… I decided this was due to having a ‘musician’s sensibility’ and that disqualifies one from normal life. I tried this theory on a number of people and they all said, ‘No, it’s because you’re a twat.’ I’m happy to accept that verdict…”

“Growing up we could never have imagined all these industries that whole cities were based around could suddenly vanish but they did over a remarkably short period of time. So it’s well worth bearing in mind that you could wake up tomorrow and find that there is no longer an IT industry and all hope of any smart motorways is gone. You might find, even more horrifyingly, that there is no longer such a thing as management consultancy: how distraught we all would be at the loss of this extraordinary career where you can trouser a large sum of money for spouting bullshit… although quite frankly if I was offered it I’d take it.”

“Cortege… a word I particularly like, and almost impossible to say without sounding like Kenneth Williams.”

“These funerals are very much a part of New Orleans life and I recently found out that people have started having them in Crouch End… frankly there is no limit to the pretentiousness of some people, who I think should be getting buried in Ocado vans rather than messing with the traditions of New Orleans.”

And one of the most powerful introductions (despite its understatement and brevity), “…this is about people who have ‘hard jobs’ of which there are many, who very briefly got a mention in the limelight a couple of years ago didn’t they?” before the slower but relentless military-snare-driven pulse and hypnotic, acerbic lyric of Hard Work.

… and if you’ve got this far then ‘Well done!’ you obviously have a longer attention span than the blues boor who shouted ‘Get on with it!’ at Ealing this year, and (we think, therefore you are) just the kind of thoughtful, mature individual who’d appreciate Mark’s oeuvre. Get along to a show near you, you’ll be in good company.

Erin Rae Nashvilles Best Kept Secret Comes To The UK @erinrae_music

Known as East Nashville’s go to harmony girl – if you’re listening to a record by Margo Price, Andrew Combs, chatting to Richard Thompson or Aaron Lee Tasjan – they will sing the praises of Erin Rae. An incredibly talented singer-songwriter, who worked under the wing of the late Phoebe Binkley (famous vocal coach), it wasn’t long before Erin stepped out into the spotlight with full length debut…

Amanda: [gerundive] ‘which must be loved’…

… there may not have been many Latin scholars but there was plenty of love for Amanda St John’s first London headline show at the Green Note. A small but perfectly informed audience sat in rapt silence for the Northern Irish singer’s intimate and confessional hour-and-a-half set.

The compact and bijou (i.e. tiny) room was the perfect place for Amanda to bare her soul with both her songs and her interaction with the room, backed just by Mike Ross on guitar (whose excellent opening set had included a fine Melissa as tribute to Gregg Allman) and Lorenz Okello-Osengor on upright piano.

Amanda’s own songs ranged from slow, southern soul waltzes like If I Should Fall or the powerful gospel-tinged Stop, through modern show tune territory in the Bayer Sager-like Reach and the airy encore of Melodies, to heartfelt ballads like the emotional Ready and the dramatic fado-style Where Is The Man.

Another gospelly southern anthem, Grow, showed off Amanda’s vocal range, from a sultry near-whisper to passion-laden oomph in the chorus and an intense higher register to close, while the upbeat 60s twist of Right Now showed a sassier, playful side. On both of those songs Amanda drew in the audience, to adding their own chorus to Grow and keeping a steady handclap beat throughout Right Now - no mean feat with the forces to hand! And there was more participation in the Cotton Club jazziness of Big Strong Man, with Amanda leading a Cab Calloway call and response.

More overtly bluesy fare was provided in the New Orleans vibe of the (Jon Tiven co-written) Show Me, and the funky Black Hearted Womanesque You Blew It. Two blues scene standards were handled with aplomb and a lightness of touch: I’d Rather Go Blind was taken as more of a breezy stroll than often is the case, while their relaxed, soulful take on Piece Of My Heart was more Irma than Janis, thankfully.

A third cover was the highly impressive Mercy Now, by Mary Gauthier: a mid-paced, country soul number with Amanda on acoustic guitar, Mike adding excellent southern-fried fills and runs, and Lorenz’s steady piano crescendo closing in a simple solo. The highly effective two-man band did a great job throughout, creating just the right atmosphere and adding their own embellishments to Amanda’s vocal, and they were joined to great effect by guest Tom Brundage who brought his usual classy fluid harmonica playing to Big Strong Man.

Amanda has a fine voice: she can do delicate, she can do rafter shaking, and there’s sufficient grit and soul to drive home the obvious emotion behind her songs.