He might not be pretty, but his music is truly beautiful. Hand-picked by the headliners to support them on this date, Glaswegian guitar player RM HUBBERT manages something few support acts ever achieve, especially solo acoustic performers: he commands silence from a decent-sized crowd within seconds.
How does he do it? He appears on stage, sits down, announces himself and plays a tune. As simple as that. Only, it’s plain to see that this guy’s got something special, with some truly virtuoso guitar playing that utilises the whole instrument to create complex rhythm patterns to accompany his exquisite picking.
He also sings heartbreakingly sad songs drawn from personal experience. A warm and extremely humble performer, he intersperses the songs with anecdotes and explanatory prefaces. His openness and sincerity are extraordinary and completely uncontrived. “A weird kind of therapy” is how he describes his music, and he succeeds in holding the crowd spellbound to the last note.
The emotional intensity of RM’s performance is the perfect primer for the main event. Tonight’s show is the last of the UK leg of THE TWILIGHT SAD'S album tour, and begins with the now familiar submarine bass pulses that precede the tetchy percussion and taut guitar intro of ‘Kill it in the Morning’.
Unsurprisingly, much of the set is culled from the chilly and precipitous ‘No One Can Ever Know’, with ‘Don’t Move’ immediately following the slow-building opener. ‘Dead City’, with its agitated bassline and sturdy beats and the tense ‘Alphabet’ are also dispatched during the first half of the set. The band still manage to sandwich in an anguish-laden rendition of ‘That Summer, At Home I Became the Invisible Boy’ and a suitably feedback-drenched performance of ‘Reflection of the Television’ into the claustrophobic space they create, and ‘I Became a Prostitute’ is predictably explosive and poignant.
Throughout the set, James has been experiencing difficulty with his wireless in-ear monitors, but rather than throw a strop, he apologises that they’re being let down by the kit they’ve bought instead of clothes (he’s sporting a very tasteful knitted jumper and when he kneels to pour his all into his lyrics, it’s possible to see that the soles of his pumps are split to fuck) and continues to wrest every ounce of heart and soul into the performance.
It’s this commitment that makes The Twilight Sad so very special, and one of the reasons their fans are so dedicated. Of course it’s about the music, too. In fact it’s all about the music, on both sides. It’s as James told me in an interview on the last tour: it doesn’t matter if there are four people in the audience, they’ll still give them a show and give it 100%. Consequently, a few technical hitches won’t see the band turn diva. If anything, they work even harder to make up.
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While the older songs sound just the way one would expect – and at the volume they band play at, they sound punishing – the new material reveals new depths in a live context. The guitars, low in the mix on the studio versions, utterly shred, especially when you’re six feet from Andy MacFarlane’s speaker stack. Meanwhile, Mark Devine’s percussion takes on an increasingly dominant place in the sound. He’s always been a hard-hitter, but having augmented his kit with some electronic pads, the mechanised disco beats – particularly on ‘Nil’ and ‘Another Bed’ – are extra punchy, phenomenally tight and really drive the songs along.
At one point James tears the malfunctioning earpieces out and discards the new technology to battle on despite being unable to hear much on stage. After giving them a second go, James gives up on the new gear completely and rather than “fuck up” the intensely personal ‘Cold Days From the Birdhouse’, he vacates the stage and sings from three rows into the audience, and remains in the crowd for a lacerating performance of ‘Nil’. As a performer who doesn’t tend to make much verbal contact with the crowd (and avoids eye contact at all costs), and whose nature is to lose himself in the music rather than the sea of bodies before him, it’s a rare thing. The chances are it’s probably not something he’s altogether comfortable with. Yet despite it all, he closes his eyes, regains that total immersion that’s so essential to the performance and sings his heart out. It’s more than mildly appreciated.
Normal service is resumed for the final blistering salvo of ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ and ‘At the Burnside’, which culminates in a landslide of punishing feedback. The crowd remains rooted to the spot until the final sound dies away and the band vacate the stage, once again triumphant.
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