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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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DR
JOHN AND THE LOWER 911
Cabot
Hall, Canary Wharf, London, 4th May 2006
God
damn! It’s hot, humid and sticky. In the
Big Easy it’s 28 degrees. But we’re
not in Bourbon Street, we’re in Canary Wharf,
London’s city within a city, its monument
to mendacity, where it’s just as hot. And
as if summer has arrived at a stroke all the City
Boys and their City Girls have spilled out onto
the walkways, lagers in hand, blindly blocking
the path of pedestrians as they excitedly talk
about the deals and doings of the day. Inside
Cabot Hall, surely one of London’s weirdest
venues (a couple of years ago The Photographer
saw the Alabama 3 here – now how weird is
that?) the burly security guards are bristling,
arms crossed in that most aggressive British fashion,
over their beefy chests. I imagine they spend
most of their day somewhere underground, far beneath
these towering buildings, guarding piles of gold,
no – loads of money, no - it must be discs
of digital transactions of re-mortgaged futures,
or whatever the latest worthless thing is that
some genius has managed to turn into millions.
Anyway, they’re with us now, and they’re
not taking shit from no-one. |
| On
stage as support we have the pretty (well, pretty
predictable to be honest) Catherine
Feeney, another of those American singers with
a ‘little girl lost’ voice and a sort
of vaguely folky west coastish sort of sound. Her
songs, as she tells us, “are all about relationships”.
The Photographer, who at the moment could permanently
eat a horse – snorts with derision; “for
god’s sake”, she says, “why doesn’t
someone sing about sausages instead”. An extreme
view – but I know what she means. Anyway Catherine
loves the UK so much that she’s moved to Norfolk,
and she has a band of tractor-boys to prove it.
And she has a new album, Hurricane Glass, on its
way out in June – so you can make your own
mind up. |
| We’re
sitting down at tables, “nightclub style”,
but it feels like we’re at a wedding reception
– one of those when you don’t really
know who’s getting married or why you’ve
been invited. We’re waiting to see the good
Dr John
and his band, the Lower 911, named after a district
of New Orleans, which was incidentally one of those
worst hit by last year’s Hurricane Katrina.
You may remember that we last saw the
Doctor playing solo, and featuring his then
new album, N’Awlinz Dis Dat or D’udda,
which they liked so much in your France Serge, that
it was given an Académie
Charles Cros 57ème Palmarès award,
which apparently is very good. Since then he’s
recorded a just released album Mercernary, a tribute
to the works of Johnny Mercer (and not too well
received by the critics it should be said, but you
can download a free track from Mercernary here,
and a rapidly recorded fundraiser for various New
Orleans charities, Sippiana Hericane. The Doctor
chooses to live in New York these days, but his
band and entourage are all New Orleaners and flood
survivors, and the Mercernary album was recorded
there. So it’s hardly any surprise that there’s
even more of a New Orleans theme – both celebratory
and defiant - to this evening than would normally
be the case at one of his gigs. |
 |
| The
band are as hot as the weather, in fact hotter.
Drummer Herman Ernest III (who gives us a short
master class in New Orleans drumming techniques
later in the evening) and bassist David Barard have
played together for about twenty years, and have
a huge list of notable collaborations in addition
to their work with the Doctor – guitarist
John
Fohl joined the band a few years ago. But they’re
tight versatile and funky, and by way of setting
out their stall pull off a superb Meters pastiche
in the middle of ‘Iko iko’. And they
can sing like a church choir (from New Orleans that
is, not New Cross). With them we get a bit less
of the Doctor’s hugely complex piano playing
than we did when he was solo – but he’s
also playing a wonderfully battered Hammond B3,
so it’s swings and roundabouts really. The
Doctor walks onto the stage, cane in hand, like
a tripped out old aged pensioner; by his standards
he’s in garrulous form, and even treats us
to some of his (fairly restrained) ‘voodoo
dancing’; you’d be embarrassed if it
was your grandfather, but coming from the Doctor
it’s sinister, funky and fun. |
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|
The set is a very mixed bag drawn from an extensive
repertoire including Creole Moon’s ‘One
2am too many’, ‘It don’t mean
a thing’, ‘Sweet home New Orleans’
(from Sippinia Hericane), ‘Iko iko’,
from Mercernary ‘Save the bones for Henry
Jones’ (“at last a song about food”,
said The Photographer), ‘Renegade’,
‘Now that you’ve got me’, ‘Right
place, wrong time’, ‘When the Saints’,
and for an encore a medley (or perhaps I should
say gumbo) of New Orleans favourites. By that time
the wedding party had really warmed up, the front
of the stage was filled with dancing kids (much
to the bewilderment of the Doctor) and the security
guards had largely given up, so The Photographer
went to work. And, at least for a few minutes, you
might have thought that the free-spirit of New Orleans
had managed to permeate the thick walls of this
fortress of ill-gained fortunes. Then the Doctor
slowly tripped off stage, the lights went up, the
security guards regained their composure and we
trooped out into the crowds of still drinking City
types, buoyed by the warmth of the musical heart-beat
of a city that could benefit enormously from a fraction
of the obscene bonuses these braying bankers pay
themselves. But hey, that’s the way of the
world. You could do worse than buy the Doctor’s
Sippinia Hericane, or maybe make a donation to the
New Orleans Musicians'
Clinic. - Nick Morgan (concert photographs
by Kate The Photographer) |
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the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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