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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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| JIM
WHITE - Bush Hall, London
Thursday November 4th - by giga-deluxe guest writer
Nick Morgan
Jim
White walks onto the small stage
beneath the Versailles-styled plasterwork of London’s
Bush Hall, dressed in baggy jeans, an uncomfortable
brown jumper and a Du-Pont branded baseball cap
(could he have worked for Seagrams in the good
old days ?) and announces that he lives in a peripheral
world. Then, only a few bars into creating his
first song of the evening his Byzantine complex
of cables and effects pedals falls over –
failed, ironically, by a Duracell Battery. Lesson
number one of the evening. Never trust the everlasting
pink drumming bunny.
Jim’s world is a sepia coloured road movie,
driving past the blank billboards of an endless
highway that leads to the darker corners of the
American psyche; girls, lay-preachers, perverts,
lonely motel rooms, railroad-tracks, Jesus, child-abusers,
girls, lonely motel rooms, angels, murderers,
God, gas-stations, girls (from Brownsville Texas),
motor-homes, lonely motel rooms, angels, girls,
God, Jesus … Get the picture ? |
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Make
no mistake, Jim is a lovely guy. Honestly. He loves
his daughter (I’m sure that’s her in
the passport photo taped to his Telecaster –
yes, another Telecaster artiste!); one of his prettiest
songs, which he sings tonight, is ‘Bluebird’
(from the must-have album of the year – Drill
me a hole in that substrate …), about the
pain of missing her when he’s in …,
well you guessed it, a lonely motel room. And he
thanks us sincerely for being there – because
gigs help pay for her education – and we all
know he means it. So how can he take us to those
dark places? |
| A
new song, performed with astonishing accomplishment
(I’ll get on to that later) is ‘Take
me away’ – a mentally ill (or is he?)
man’s cry as he runs towards the overpowering
lights of an oncoming train (on a railroad, needless
to say) – or is he running to that stranger
on the other side of the track, who must be ….
(don’t be lazy- you should be able to guess
by now). Either way- it’s a messy ending.
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| But
don’t be fooled by all this southern white-boy
zeitgeist baloney and the hardly deserved banal
alt.country tag that Jim often gets. He skilfully
paints a musical vista just as dense and enticing
as his lyrical landscape. A few months earlier in
London he played with a four piece backing band
an almost studio-perfect set, largely of Drill me
a hole … Tonight he’s solo, and he rocks,
rolls, raps and grooves through thirteen songs,
laying down voice, keyboard and guitar loops (nothing
pre-recorded) over which he picks the Telecaster
and his lovely banjo-style electric. |
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‘Take
me away’ – it deserves to be mentioned
twice – is a virtuoso performance, as is ‘A
perfect day for chasing Tornadoes’ (a song,
he tells us in a surfing reminiscence, about walking
towards your fear, not away from it), ‘Alabama
Chrome’ and ‘If Jesus drove a motor
home’. And we’re with him in that (lonely
motel?) room where (we were told) he spent twenty
years playing songs that no-one wanted to hear –
except us.
So Jim ends the gig, as he did last time, by simply
raising the lights and sitting on the edge of the
stage to talk to his (hugely diverse) audience.
He doesn’t do encores. In June he played the
encore halfway through the set – ‘just
to get rid of it’. And Kate shakes his hand
and hands him a note, with Serge’s website
address on it – “Have a look Jim, there’ll
be a review there”. “I’ll look
just as soon as I can” he drawls.
So as you read this, Jim just might be somewhere
out there on the lonely super-highway of life, reading
this review as he eats a few waffles at the wheel
of his recreational vehicle, his best little girl
by his side … - Nick Morgan (photos by
Kate) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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There's nothing more down there... |
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