On Thursday, I went over to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire for an evening of sea-shanties, soldiers, murderous butchers and women of ill-repute…brought courtesy of Oregon-based indie sweethearts The Decemberists. I wasn't sure how well they would come across live, but lead singer Colin Meloy’s occasionally grating voice actually sounded better than on record, and he’s an unexpectedly confident and charming frontman whose love of theatricality this show from mere greatness to one that was truly wonderful.
The music is of course as fantastic as you’d expect; the Crane Wife 1 (one of the best songs of last year) was as lovely and emotional as one could hope for, their love of the macabre and insalubrious came across brilliantly in the Sweeny Todd-ish “The Shankill Butchers” and crowd-pleaser “O Valencia” got everyone singing along at the top of their voices. But it was the little ‘extras’ that made this gig special; the middle-of-the-set exercise session (”and up, and down, and up, and down, and jump around…”), the extended singalong during ’16 Military Wives’ where Colin conducted various parts of the audience in singing the refrain, the bit in ‘Sons and Daughters’ where the band invited crowd members on stage to sing with them.
During the encore, Colin brought on some special guests- The Soft Boys’ Robyn Hitchcock and the Waterboys’ Mike Scott. He has often mentioned them in interviews as two of his greatest influences and as such, he was quite visibly over-the-moon at the opportunity to perform with them. With Robyn he played “Madonna of the Wasps” and with Mike a brilliant “Fisherman’s Blues” complete with rock-out coda, before concluding the show with the gypsy ballad of A Cautionary Song, complete with various members of the band re-enacting the American War of Independence in the middle of audience. As you do. Although from my basic understanding of early US history, I don’t think meteorites really blew everyone up in the end…But hey, who cares about historical accuracy with a show as good as this? Not quite AF standard (but what is?) but definitely in the highest tier of gigs I've had the pleasure to see.
(Photo's mercilessly stolen from the interwebs and Fiona from UKK)
No comments:
Post a Comment