overlap

Sometimes a gig feels a bit more like an obligation than a party, and having been sat on the ticket for weeks, it would have been a waste not to go. Eventually getting it together to get on the road at about doors, it wasn't a surprise to turn up and find the place already pretty full, and with a restricted view for all but those at the front or on the benches at the sides, it was more a question of finding suitable elbow room. Bailey & Bowles - I dunno who the Bowles character is, but Chip Bailey is familiar as the sometime percussion loon in Duke Special's band. Cutting an intriguing figure like Baldrick's minstrel brother, there's a reliance on traditional standards in what little of the set I see, and to be honest it would probably work a bit better if you were already five pints in to your night. The cover of Badfinger's No Matter What is a nice touch to end on though. Foreign Slippers is unclear whether it's the name of the duo act, or the frontwoman on her own. Either way, it's one for my questionable act names files. Coming on with a 'hat' made of more foliage than my long-haired cat picks up in a week of running around the hedges, she looks distinctive, and while I'm all for studied differentness, ultimately it's all about the songs. When she opens her mouth, it's something like Bic Runga's smooth power that comes out, but with a hint of Winehouse, and a boatload of excessive melisma. The cover of Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down could work as a stripped back acoustic country ballad, but when it's apparently underpinned by sampled drums it sort of misses the point. And that sums it up, really - it's technical excellence in need of a much more ruthless pruning of the material. Duke Special brings yet another onstage configuration of musicians, and shorn of the distractions of Chip Bailey's hyperactivity and Ben Son-Of-Roy's noodling woodwind interludes, it's a much more rocking line-up. Indeed, guitarist Paul Pilot increasingly sounds like Richard Hawley doing an impression of Neil Young, and that can only be a good thing. A lot of the new album gets aired, and the songs from the Hector Mann film series are a neat novelty, in both senses of the word. Particularly The Jockey Club, which rhymes day-trips with aviatrix, and is another track that I'll be looking forward to hearing again. Over ninety minutes, it's a decent enough selection of material, even if the increasing rock strengths of the band seem a little constrained by a venue that's a bit too intimate, but that's not a problem I expect to last a long time as the demand certainly exists for him and them to move into more suitable, bigger places.

Labels: Duke Special, gigs