Chapel Arts Bath
After the gig, as Chris Wood puts away his instruments and rolls up his cables he carries on chatting to the audience. We go up and thank him for the show. He starts to chat to us. About protest songs -- there isn't much point to a lot of them; there is not point in singing 'We Shall Overcome' if you won't. (He references Grace Petrie in the gig: "better songs than mine have failed.") About politics and democracy: the greatest problem is ignorance, but if you talk about that, you seem to be making yourself superior. (We need to find a way of talking about, so it will stop being taboo: after all, homosexuality used to be taboo, and now it's normal.) About his own song writing: if you observe closely, the truth will come out. (He mentions George Orwell's description of the military execution.) He's just chatting; but it feels like a continuation of the performance. This is a man who thinks seriously; who needs his songs to mean something and to have a point. He claims to have spent much of lockdown in his study, writing angry songs, which he doesn't quite want to unleash on an audience. We'd like to hear them.
He sings mostly about the ordinary. About spending the last evening on an old sofa before moving house ("with the ghost of the dog".) About an old man who used to rent the allotment next to his. ("Two hipsters took it on/they haven't got a clue.") Strangely, about Superman watering his plants and paying his phone bill before leaving home. He (Superman) is tired of trying to do good. He's been replaced by also-rans.("Can someone tell me who the hell is Iron Man?") He isn't going to write about Ukraine until it's all over; but he thinks maybe the sofa song is indirectly about refugees. There is warmth, but also anger ("I fucking hate online gigs, it's a lot of bollocks." His online gig, sitting in a wheel barrow in his shed, was one of the brightest points of lockdown.) He is conscious of himself as a grumpy old man, and laughs at himself as he does it. The final song was a birthday present written for a friend who he plays country music with one night a week; indirectly about men not communicating feelings to each other. ("He said 'that's shit' so I knew it was good".) There is one song directly about ignorance ("if ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise") and one about the extent to which the English positively like tipping their hats to anyone vaguely posh. He has a song for his grown up son, advising him not to take his advise. He plays While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks (one of the Yorkshire versions) and Jerusalem (his own version). He winds up with Ronnie Lane's Poacher. He is a first rate guitarist but not that showy, so you can miss how good he is. His singing varies between a purr and a growl. I think he has slowed the Poacher down compared with how he's done it before: more emphasis on the meditative stanza ("fish the size of new born babies") and less on the tum-ti-tum-ti-tum instrumental. He does the devastating Hollow Point: he says that someone has played the song to the two policeman involved and they were okay with it. But he's clearly moved on from the big emotional set pieces and towards observation and stream of consciousness. He likes to put details into the songs: you might have to listen to The Love That Will Not Let You Fail twice to understand why there is a sign saying "Hoover For Sale" in the window. There can be astonishing poetry: "we laugh at Jesus as we walks out on the water and we undermine the faithful with our teasing / but in the vaults of the bank of England they are sacrificing chickens to a god that they call quantitive easing."
I don't know how to convey how special a Chris Wood can be. Like Steve Knightley -- like Bob Dylan, cone to think of it -- you feel that you are drinking a small sample of one big interconnected universe; that the man on the stage is taking you on a journey through Chris-Wood-Land.
Listen To: This Love Will Not Let You Fail
No comments:
Post a Comment