Wow, it's been quite a while since I've been to Brixton- I suppose after working there for a year I'd had enough of its mentalist street evangelists, blase drug dealers and curious mix of vibrant multi-culturalism and inescapable low-level menace for the foreseeable future. But events transpired to bring me back there today (despite the best efforts of influenza, asthma and two-hour (!!!) tube delays) for an excellent early-evening show by lo-fi indie troubadour Jeffrey Lewis.
His voice is never going to win awards, but Lewis' endearingly scattershot approximation of the notes he's supposed to be hitting fits perfectly with his similarly ramshackle attitude to song-writing. One of the grand old men of the New York anti-folk scene, typified by their focus on quirky, often surreal lyrics and subject matters, he wittily sums up his range of his oeuvre as "morose introspection, or animals." The melodies themselves are simple (although Stanley Brinks of Herman Dune fame is on hand to add a little extra depth) but they're ulimately unimportant- for Lewis, it's all about the words. And whether they concern love or more esoteric topics he infuses them with his trademark wit and creativity, making them more short stories put to music than 'songs' in the classical folk sense. A couple of Crass covers (from his recent LP consisting of nothing but) are particularly well received, but the highlights were, as always, when Lewis unleashed his formidable cartooning skills. Last time I saw him, he delivered a fantastic illustrated lesson on Mao's Long March which was both illuminating and hilarious and today he gave two similar examples of his genius. Early in the set, he gave us a short, minute-long 'documentary' about the life of Obama, where he succinctly summarised the President-elect's career via the medium of an beautifully illustrated A3 sketch pad and a spoken word poem; later on we received his skewed (although, alas, unfinished) take on the film-noir genre which included a memorable and perhaps unique instance of saxophone sex. Quite.
Unfortunately, time constraints meant he could only perform for a touch over 45 minutes (he played a more substantial set later than evening, which both CB and Anika attended) but despite the show's brevity, it was well worth the significant stress involved in trekking there. The man's quite possibly a genius, and I'll definitely have to be more on-the-ball when his next shows go on sale- three quarters of an hour in Jeffrey Lewis' company just ain't enough.
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