A 1940's Gibson guitar with f holes; a 1950s baseball cap with a high-badged front, and he's sitiing down like a Tennessee farmer on the front porch. KURT WAGNER is the heart of LAMBCHOP with a slow country pulse. He doesn't rush his audience, but he knows they'll be listening to every word and intonation.
Tony Crow had taken the stage first with some rueful cocktail piano. Eventually, five more LAMBCHOP stalwarts join him. As Kurt Wagner ambled past, he gave Crow a glance that says: "Oh that stuff...just carry on 'til we're ready. It'll do very nicely." And for the next hour, Kurt gets no tobacco and we get a lifetime of great songs.
There are plenty from "Is A Woman" and plenty from earlier times. Wagner is up there with the great American songwriters: a craftsman and a poet. His vocal delivery is rich, confiding and seductive. It looks effortless.
The band simmer along, holding back to give the voice plenty of room.Kurt's like your favourite deep-voiced uncle telling you secrets that you're really too young to know.
This is a band on stage tonight. The playing is a treat. Tony Crow lays out the piano work in the middle. He's a very classy pianist and the arrangements get complexity and depth from what he's doing. Three guitars (including Wagner's funky Gibson) are an orchestra and a horn section all by themselves. They play quietly and generate astonishing, intricate music.
They never stop listening and they flip those foot switches with invisible precision. Bass and drums are exquisitely precise, with a relaxed, loose feel that only the tightest of bands can achieve. In the whole set, there are just two or three crescendoes. They come in firestorms. The patient slow burn suddenly ignites and the thrill of the loud bit is intense. These people are good. We knew that from the CDS, but the live experience puts the recordings in the shade.
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All I can say is that you missed it. Tonight's unique show was staged in the fading red and gold Music Hall of Leeds City Varieties, with its' very close up and personal ambience.
CHACDA had opened up and found the intimacy of the place a bit intimidating for their first ever UK gig. Between songs Chantal Acda - singer/ bassist and guitarist - was a little fazed by the polite Englishness of it all. But her full-throated vocal performance and the band's subtleties said "Listen here, we're something special." Their beautiful minimalist approach was a great preparation for the established star to follow.
The queue for their CD "La Sortie" was very busy in the interval. Teuk Henri is a fine guitar player, in the restrained and FX modulated mould of LAMBCHOP. Clarinet, melodica (Marissa von Movrik) and a guitar playing, singer/drummer (Boris Gronemberger) mix it all up most enticingly.
Charming, musical, inventive. Destined to win devoted fans worldwide. Two from Belgium, two from the Netherlands.
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