“Oh my god! Your coat smells sooo musty” she says it like a compliment. The group at the bar taking up space in the messy way young people do, and to fair to her the once yellow duster and the person it belongs to looks like a sentient jumble sale, topped off with a dirty blue cap with fluffy tartan earflaps. I try to tune them out.
“Do you remember that song ‘Feeling Good’? By Micheal Buble? We should cover that!” says another.
I look over at Lucy and we both decide to leave the cosy bar of the Quadrant and climb the tiny staircase to the gig.
We head upstairs to The Folklore Rooms, a venue hiding in the attic. There’s seating for perhaps forty people but by the time thirty have taken their seats the room feels very full and going to the toilet would be a near impossible gauntlet of stools. The decor is forced quaint, but not overwhelming. Vintage books glued to the walls and plastic ivy creeping over every available space like a cursed prince’s garden from a gothic novel. I counted just over thirty people and when we were settled a man with what I call a ‘Guess Who face’ (if you were playing guess who there’d be a lot of ways to get rid of him, do they have glasses? Do they have a mustache? Do they have a beard?) Welcomes us all and announces the first act.
Jasper Hodges is a tall lad with model good looks and a broad easy smile, that I suspect he knows how charming it is. His set starts with him getting the audience to sing the melody too, which takes several minutes because as he says comfortably “I’ve fully forgotten what it goes like”.
The songs are delicate but his voice isn’t, with a strong southern accent and gravel character that defies his young age with which he roars at the notes. The guitar work is a little Jose Gonzales at times but his lyrics are Sam Fender, speaking to loss, nostalgia, and the kitchen sink of growing up with an open heart. Looking at the crowd I see them adrift in the art and the memories and feelings they invoke.
Next called up is Taygore Chanye and its the sentient jumble sale from earlier. He has a lot of support in the room that knows every song and is in on every joke. They duly whoop in the right moments and sing along unprompted. Which, honestly, leaves the rest of us a little behind.
His songs tend to have an american folk quality, and I can hear shades of Simon and Garfunkel in places, mostly Garfunkel. He has a deep mellifluous voice that compliments his songs. He uses this voice to do a powerful acapella version of a Greg Porter song that was, admittedly, stunning.
In between songs he has a giggling gnomish quality. Which his fans seem to love because when he finishes there is a literal queue to meet him during the second break.
When we get back from the break most of Taygore’s fans have left. Which is their loss because they missed Harper.
Harper are a four piece that managed to fold themselves into the corner stage, with four guitars, a keyboard and a drumset. The lead is a tiny witch girl with big round glasses, her voice is Somewhere between Stevie Nicks but without the dirt, Lana Del Ray but without the opiate distance, and Florence if her machine was four awkward looking twenty somethings.
The music is dreamy indie pop, the instruments lend to a overwhelming full sound with rolling bass and drums that sounds a little close to Fleetwood Mac if all the men in the band were not arseholes.
“Thank you for sticking around,” she says.
The set has the audience lost, but together. Summer music in the dead of winter. It makes me sad that I’ll never be the sort of artist that can take your broken heart and stitch it to others, just for a short while. But at least I get to be woven together with strangers for three minutes at a time.
******
If you liked this post, consider buying my latest book STARING DEATH IN THE FACE: SEARCHING FOR THE REAPER ACROSS MEXICO.
If you have already got a copy why not leave a review? It’d really help
Danny Smith is on a mission: to find Death – and have a word.
He’s lost, nearly forty, dumped, and surrounded by bin bags full of his clothes in his parents’ spare room.
Mourning not only the loss of the most important person in his life, but also the only future he ever really planned, his thoughts turn to death. If he’s going to start his life over, he may as well start at the end and work back. Find Death and become, if not friends, then at least on nodding terms. It’s not a good plan, but it’s the only one he’s got.
He’s stalking Death to Mexico. Home of The Day Of The Dead Festival, Santa Muerte the patron saint of drug dealers and the dispossessed, and a bloody cartel drug war that’s been going since the 80s. Death seems to be big over there.
The trail will take him to ancient temples, vibrant bustling markets, white sands, with weird tourists, and a neon blur of excess. Can he find his love of life now the love of his life has gone?
Available HERE