overlap

Well, not quite twenty years, as it turns out this gig takes place a mere 7,281 days since I first saw The Frank And Walters, or 19.93 years if you want it that way. Sadly I haven't seen them as many times in between as I might like, but it's no real surprise that with their New York sojourn and the inevitable demands of putting food on the table our paths haven't crossed so frequently.

Support band Drawings For Paris (yes, another one of those names) ply a gentle trade in mature guitar-led pop with a moderately epic feel - they remind me of Salvation and that's never a bad thing in my book. Half a dozen tracks are downloadable from their website, and I'm especially fond of Here She Comes Again from their, er, "Salvation" ep!"
 
Moving on to the headliners, their story tells us something of where we've all been in the meantime. My first copy of Trains, Boats and Planes was on vinyl but I've moved on to CD versions of that and everything since, and the couple of weeks delay between the latest album Greenwich Mean Time becoming available in a digital format and the CDs being in their hands so they could stick them in the post even had me on the verge of reluctantly joining the modern world and buying the tracks in a digital format,daddio. And all the same, the album booklet being available for download in pdf format meant I could check out the lyrics to songs available as singles or in session versions before the CD itself popped into my eager, sweaty mitts.

This endless changing of the seasons is also heavily evident in the themes of this album, with artwork based around the elements of the clockwork mechanism and songs with titles like Twenty Years, The Clock and Trust In The Future all making that point clear.

Band stalwarts Paul Linehan and Ashley Keating are joined only by fresh-faced guitarist Rory Murphy, keyboardist Cian Corbett being unavailable for the evening. Trimmed down to a trio, old songs and new bounce along, energetically buoyed up on the ineffable humour that runs between Linehan and Keating like lightning runs down a conductor cable. When your drummer has a vocal mike almost exclusively so he can backchat his singer, it's a sign your band exists in a separate plane of its own internal dynamic.



Rory's broken guitar string leads into an improvised bout of Linehanisms, just as Paul's bass guitar strap coming loose towards the end of the set results in him completing most of This Is Not a Song supporting the weight of his bass on his knee despite the poor efforts at "helping" him by draping the strap over the strings on the fretboard.




This pretty much sums up the Frank and Walters - whatever happens, they just carry on, filling the world with beautiful, thoughtful sounds and apparently unaffected by changing fashions and sounding as good as they've ever done.

Twenty years and we're doing fine.

Twenty Years is track 11 on Greenwich Mean Time - buy it here.



setlist in full
Tony Cochrane
Trust In The Future
* broken guitar string debacle
Fashion Crisis Hits New York
Loneliness And Sweet Romance
Plenty Times
Little Dolls
Landslide
That's Life
Indie Love Song
The Model
The Parson
After All
Colours
This Is Not A Song
Michael

Labels: Drawings For Paris, gigs, The Frank And Walters

Ok, so I'm a few days behind. I'm now also a couple of glasses of cava down, so I reserve the right to come back and edit or remove this at a later time :-) But briefly, friday saw me make a nice transportly-challenged trip to London to go and see the Frank And Walters playing their first show in England in a number of years - for a moment or two it was 1993 again, and they were great. I'm surprised to find I hadn't seen them more than three times back in the mists of time, so they obviously left a good impression as I wouldn't have missed this show for anything. Saturday saw glorious morning sunshine through western central London, and fortunately I was just smart enough to avoid entering the traffic madness of Twickenham on a rugby day. Through a series of things that mostly didn't quite go as planned, I failed to make it to a social event that would have allowed me to make the most of my wardrobe, but no matter - it's really not the end of the world. Sunday? Well, an afternoon gig is an interesting thing I've not encountered before. When you see a guy in a suit and tie, in a trilby and nonchalantly smoking while playing an electric double bass, you know the intended visual effect is some arty late 1950s Parisian jazz cafe. Late at night in a rammed sweaty club it seems vaguely appropriate for what it's aimed at being, but at 1.30pm on a sunday when the streets outside are full of early xmas shoppers it seems utterly bizarre. And it's certainly not my preferred style of music anyway. You may well see them in the top forty come sunday, and The Pipettes would be a welcome addition to the nation's hit parade. Polka dots in a 50s circle skirt style, three women singers with some great hand jiving and still not quite as stage school rehearsed into perfection as yer average girl band. Think the Shirelles by way of Helen Love and you are not far away - tremendous stuff, love it. Life-affirming upbeat uptempo shallow pop music at its finest. Enough catching up, and enough cava!

Labels: gigs, The Frank And Walters, The Pipettes