Earlier in the week we were over at the Union Chapel, to see Laura Veirs on the last date of her European tour, dubbed ‘The Hall of Flames’.
The gig started with Alex Guy, a long-term collaborator of Laura’s, who mixes layers of viola tones, bounces and scrapes to accompany her gentle voice in a series of folk-related tunes. She’s the perfect foil for Laura’s more complex arrangements which were to come later. Sam Amidon was up next, who I’ve not heard before – a tall, rangy singer (a Texan would be my guess) with that peculiar reedy voice that seems to be confined to male folk singers from the south, his set consisted of traditional songs clearly selected for their contrasting humour and pathos. I note he has a new album out, ‘I See The Sign‘, which I think I might pick up soon – it will make a nice contrast to the heavily produced stuff that forms most of my music collection!
Now I’m not going to regale you with a full run-down of the songs that Laura and her collaborators performed tonight – if you want, you can read my thoughts about previous performances in 2010 at the Jazz Cafe and Union Chapel here and here. What I am going to tell you about is the atmosphere that you get at a Laura Veirs gig, where the audience become temporary members of her clan for the evening…
It’s difficult to describe the warmth that you feel when you’re sitting with other Laura Veirs fans – it’s perfectly OK at a gig like this to chat with complete strangers sitting next to you, after all we’re all acolytes of her unique musical style. I remember seeing Laura do a small acoustic gig at the now long-gone Fopp record store in Camden Town where everyone in the room sat down quietly on the floor as Laura performed, like some well-behaved primary school assembly – amazing. Tonight, between songs, Laura told us all the details of her European tour, in particular how after some great performances elsewhere in Europe, on arriving in France everything that could go wrong did – the tour van broke down, there was food poisoning, diarrhea – you get the picture. To laughter and cheers from the audience she went on to say that after emerging from the channel tunnel in Kent everything miraculously went back to normal. She also explained how she was coping with having Tennessee, her 1 year old little boy, with her on the tour – basically everyone in the tour party was acting as a surrogate aunt or uncle. I’ll leave you with a YouTube video of the title song of her last album, ‘July Flame‘, that might go some way towards explaining why I find her music so appealing… Check out her tour blog too, where you can see some pictures of her cute little boy.
About Pete Stean
