Virtually Acoustic @ Tinder Box
2001-10-15
The Tinderbox Coffee Shop
Upper Street
Islington
I arrive late - 7:15 - and perhaps a bit flustered. I have a decaf cappuchino and the first of many glasses of water and try to prepare mentally.
Please note - not the schoolboy use of the word "mental".
It's much noisier than last time - I suspect that there's a 5;30 to 8:00 clientele and then it goes quiet. Since everybody who is there to see me (David, Charlotte, SAC, Aiden McGee) is there for the long haul I start slowly with vaguer and more difficult ones (Free Time is the first, and that might have been a mistake, because I trip over the notes and it's not a very confident start). Actually, what I played after that, I'm not sure. but there were all the new ones, and a lot of old ones, some of which I was playing inadvertantly. For example, towards the end I played Going Down the Country, which I wrote when I arrived in London twelve years ago. But having played the first chords I have to follow it through. I am genuinely very nervous that I will completely blank on the chords.
Anyway, I'm try to concentrate on singing around the soreness in my throat which developed this afternoon.
And the only one I don't get round to doing is The Secret Agent's Dream as well as some of the longer ones, and actually quite a few songs, now I come to think of it, but Secret Agent was the standout omission . It's an interesting experience, definitely rougher than last time (David recorded it on his minidisc, so I'll be able to hear exactly how rough it is when I get round to buying a minidisc player), and it's quite difficult to concentrate with people passing in front of your nose every five seconds. Let me rephrase that. On second thoughts, I'll let it lie. But you know what I mean. I try to do the as-yet-unnamed instrumental and make a bit of a pig's ear of it.
After a couple of songs Ben occupies the booth to my right, and about halfway through, Ciara and..er... Mr Ciara (I'm terrible with names) are sitting at the end. Soon after that I kick into Little Games and feel a bit more confident, despite cocking it up a bit. In fact, every song bears the tell-tale cocking up that happens when a recording device is present (see also the Whistle Binkies gig in August), but that just means that I should do it more and get used to it. One final new one (as yet untitled) gets its debut as well, with me having to read three lines of the lyrics off a piece of paper.
Sorry it's not in chronological order. I'm a bit confused.
I take all the pictures at the end and a nice American lady takes mine, so there I am, a bit blurred, but I was feeling a bit blurred anyway..
[A week later, Aiden McGee sent me the following notes re the same performance - to give an alternative perspective from my rather Eeyore-ish one.]
JP has a wonderful physical stillness in playing - the only body movement (other than hands) that can be detected is a slight ' back and left ' [is this a reference to JFK? - jp] change in posture, which means that the occasional lyric is lost. I imagine this happens to 90% of guitarists; it is intriguing here as it is the only variation on the very relaxed, minimal movements.
The ' one chord song ' evokes the mournful nature poems of Thomas Hardy. Spare and telling.
JP seems to be dissatisfied with gig. The broad canvass of it is very good - I personally don't read much into the occasional slips or his thinking aloud about not playing well - he suits the venue well & knows how to communicate to the audience, so he shouldn't worry too much about technical perfection. I found myself nodding a lot at how good the comments sounded and how easy it was to appreciate consecutive songs - a sure sign of building up a good vibe. If he slowed down the pace of some songs a fraction and thus gave himself a little more time to think one verse ahead, he would probably attain that virtually flawless level without sounding any less soph and smooth - he's a country mile ahead of most the crowd in terms of natural technique and practical ability anyway. Just trying to be more deliberate really helps (or so I have found.)
The shorter songs are very good - suit the spare and telling style (see above).
When The River Rises much better than at open mike before.
Any gig where I am in utterly objective, analytical mood and reduced to jotting down ' very good ', ' fine ' ' brilliant ' for each song can't be that tainted by failure!! But the one thing that has stuck in my memory for the week since is the solo in ' Little Games.'
I think it was said of Concierto de Aranjuez that it was effective and popular because it corresponded exactly to how a listener imagined a Spanish guitar conert to be. No less a compliment can be paid to that solo in Little Games - it is exactly how one would idealistically envisage a bossa nova/classical sequence on a classical guitar, but it also appears perfectly in the context of a very poignant and evocative song - more than enough anticipations are met...
What I kept on thinking about when I heard stuff like When The River Rises, Country Shack and Drift Away was the Huckleberry Finn (or, more traditionally, Robinson Crusoe) idyll. There is that strong element in JP's narratives of people who bear no others harm, but who still want to be free of being accountable to others and able to enjoy nature-rooted solace - pure independents in the way that Mark Twain conceived Huck. The idea of just being able to be free and drift away to something more simple evokes Huck, Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper playing pirates on the island - and there is also that Mark Twain/William Golding feel of something sinister (and vaguely superstitious) hanging over proceedings of the innocent - as in JP's lyric about ' The Beastie.' I think JP is a Golding fan? Made me think of those other great Twain vignettes: Tom and Huck witnessing Injun Joe killing Dr Robinson/Tom Sawyer and Becky trapped in the caves/Tom, Huck and Joe ' coming back from the dead.' Like Twain, JP's ' innocents ' and ' grown ups ' (especially the Daddy figure in Little Games - a JP Aunt Polly?!) are depicted realistically and with humour - they are vulnerable, prone to bizarre situations, but not unduly mocked by the narrator.