overlap

I'm a little behind on these, but I don't want to omit this one. A new venue in what turns out to be more genteel cafe than sticky-floored nite-club had me heading up the road to a town where it turns out I haven't been to a gig since 1995. Finding the place was simple enough and I settled down to wait for the gig. Liam Dullaghan is someone I've seen before with his band The Have-Nots but on his own he's even more engaging, possibly because he has to talk directly to the crowd rather than Have-Nots co-conspirator Sophie. He has the air of Evan Dando at his most confused and vulnerable, singing like a Harvest-era Neil Young. In short it's something that seems to bring out a little of the mothering instinct in some of this crowd, along with a tiny taste of confusion at the rambling, sometimes shambling intros to the songs. Good fun, and great watching. Headliner Chris Mills is someone I first encountered nearly eight years ago. He brought me to Hawksley Workman who supported him back then, he brought me to Robbie Fulks by covering a song he'd encountered when Robbie covered it one night when they were on the same bill, and he brought me to the solo work of Jon Langford of Mekons fame, among others. All the same it's strange to go to a gig by someone who lives on another continent and who recognises you when he sees you! Mixing tracks from the new album with songs from the half dozen previous albums means that for every unfamiliar song there'll be one you do know along in a minute, but the handful of new songs I've been listening to on myspace are familiar enough too. There's a couple of stories in between songs that get cleaned up a little for the benefit of the table full of mid-teenagers with assorted parents (I assume), and the show is entirely suited to the venue, whose trade is more in decent food than rocked out hedonism. Where Liam gently floats his songs around the room, Chris fires them out with a rasp. I've seen rougher nights than this when his voice has been scratchy close to breaking, but on this occasion we stay just on the right side of gruff and croaky. And that's one of the things I like, the mixture of tender in the content of the songs and the occasional harshness in their delivery. While there's no particularly close comparison, Tom Waits seems to have done ok without what you'd call a naturally sweet voice, and in a world of autotuned identivoices, Chris is distinctive enough to stand out. I Wish I Was A Bomb closes the set neatly, and a quick chat over buying the new album and the tour ep later, I was back out on the road, to take twice as long getting home from a great little show as I took to get there in the first place, but that's another story! More pictures are on flickr, but here's Chris. "Golden throated shadows" is a line from Chris' song "Fall".

Labels: Chris Mills, gigs, Liam Dullaghan, The Havenots