Matthew Magee
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Moor than a feeling: Karine Polwart's forensic examination of place

6/11/2017

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Karine Polwart in Wind Resistance   Image: press shot

Wind Resistance by Karine Polwart / Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh / 4.11.17

Play-gig-lecture muses on nature, belonging and loss with a haunting soundtrack

Folk singer Karine Polwart was one of the hits of the Edinburgh International Festival in 2016 with Wind Resistance, an unusual show that is part-gig, part-story, part-natural history lecture. She has released it on album and script and revived the show for a week long run in Edinburgh following a week in Dublin.

The stage was dressed like a comfortable musical study and Polwart was alone throughout, intertwining spoken word and song fragments in three loose strands: her own life on Fala Flow, a peat bog beside her home south of Edinburgh; the life and love of the grandparents of a local woman Polwart met at the end of her life, and a forensic examination of the bird and plant life of the bog.

Parallels between the three strands shifted pleasingly, moving woozily in and out of focus around themes of motherhood, sacrifice, loss and belonging. There was a gentle narrative propulsion that gave it, if not tension, then at least a tightening and easing of mood.

When performing her folk music Polwart is a confident, garrulous raconteur and that carried her a long way here. Her lack of ease with the stagier movements and gestures was more than made up for by her warm, funny and sincere delivery. A one woman show is a daunting prospect for someone whose day job is acting, but Wind Resistance succeeded through Polwart's poise. Stunning sound design that connected to the on-stage action in startling bursts of invention also helped.

Short musical pieces peppered the evening. Polwart has the most beautiful, pure, clear voice, so musical that it has no use for ornament or fuss. She launched into daring, vaulting fragments of melody then back directly into speech and the transformation was magical. Waiting for it to happen again carried more suspense than any of the stories.

The music created moments of punctuation within and between the strands of the show, using elements of modern and traditional folk. The shame is only that there wasn't more of it.

The stories demanded resolution, but they couldn't bear the structural strain of being the climax of an evening of theatre, the doomed romance of her neighbour's grandparents in particular feeling simple and sentimental.

Where the script shone was in its short, self-contained fragments such as the spellbinding evocation of the moor as a place of spiritual solace, or the football commentary that connected Alex Ferguson's footballing philosophy to the flying techniques of migrating geese.

Wind Resistance made its own space somewhere between theatre, lecture and gig. It was a funny, poignant and thoughtful examination of an ordinary place made special through focus, understanding and empathy. And the music was beautiful.
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Redwood Mountain: uncovering the Scottish roots of Americana

29/9/2017

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​Finding connections Image: Ken Barclay

Redood Mountain / Glad Cafe Glasgow / 28.9.17

Folk-country with a Caledonian twist

​Following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly is a brave move, but Redwood Mountain mine the same musical material for new gems. Writing new tunes for some of the songs collected by Alan Lomax on his mid-20th century travels through the rural south of the US, the duo is keeping some pretty rarified company: Lomax was the first to record Guthrie, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and others, and gave Pete Seeger his first break.

But by seeking out songs with some kind of Scottish connection and pairing guitar with trad fiddle Redwood Mountain's Amy Geddes and Dean Owens do manage to shed some new light on the material.
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Bleak subjects, cheery delivery Image: Matthew Magee

At The Glad Café Geddes and Owens led a good-natured romp through some pretty dark subject matter (wife-shootings, prostitution, slavery) set to their own new melodies. Katy Cruel, about a prostitute Owens said was probably Scottish, had a heavy northern influence, its dark harmonies and mournful fiddle turning it into a bleak lament.

Get Along Home Cindy was pure Americana, complete with enthusiastic audience singalong, while On The Range Of The Buffalo was plain, uncomplicated and bleak.
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Withering asides Image: Ken Barclay
Owens chatted merrily through some of the songs' backstories while Geddes punctured the bonhomie with cruelly funny withering asides.

​Some of the songs had a slight pastiche feeling, but others were rich and touching. The music felt most interesting where the Scottish influence was heaviest, where you felt new lines and connections were being drawn, uncovering the common roots of two very different strands of folk music. ​
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Nick Cave: chaos and catharsis in Glasgow

28/9/2017

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Cave in full flight Image: geoff dude under CC licence CC BY-NC-ND 2

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds / Hydro Glasgow / 27.9.17

A great front man is a dictator, and Nick Cave is one of the best there is.

With unhinged intensity he whispered and bellowed the first songs at the front three rows of a packed, though not quite full, Hydro in Glasgow as though playing an intimate club show.

Then a few songs in he stretched out those bony preacher fingers and tugged the air. Hundreds of people followed his gesture, moving towards to the stage as one, mesmerised and pressing close, coming into his manic sphere of influence.

With grimacing, straining, sweating commitment he held us rapt for two hours, willing every beautifully timed syllable out as though composing them on the spot. It was mesmerising, bewitching and slightly unreal.

Backing band The Bad Seeds sounded amazing, reined-in and taut, only exploding into noisesome chaos briefly and with devastating effect. Cave too, not the strongest singer on his records, sang with surprising richness.
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Messing about in the crowd  Image: geoff dude under CC licence CC BY-NC-ND 2

The blistering, hypnotic energy of the first five songs dissipated and Cave spent too long basking in the crowd's adoration, held aloft on fans' shoulders or shepherding audience members on stage.

But along the way we got a fragile, broken Into My Arms, the crowd taking up the chorus with gentle, hymnal empathy, the air charged with sorrowful joy. The line 'I believe in love', a cliché in others' hands, became a defiant protestation of faith thrown out at the gathering darkness.

Red Right Hand was miraculously understated. It could so easily turn into an overblown carnival blast, but it was quiet, sinister, brooding, its skeezy, sleazy organ threateningly insinuating, the slick groove a lushly carpeted stairway to damnation.

The massive Hydro seemed an odd choice for someone like Cave, a determined indie oddball not given to lavish visuals or cynical profiteering. Not only did he do a better job of anyone I've ever seen of involving the whole hall through sheer force of personality, it became a bigger, more cathartic and more moving experience because twelve thousand people were there rather than twelve hundred. ​
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Sigur Ros: the light fantastic

27/9/2017

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Sigur Ros/ Armadillo Glasgow / 24.9.17

Sometimes you have to just let go. 
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Image: Kyle Mortara under CC licence CC BY-NC 2.0
A Sigur Ros gig is the last place you should look for variety, surprises or lively energy - songs blend into each other, moving at glacial pace and the soundscape shifts and drifts, but all within a well defined tone palatte.

Stay too alert and it can grate. But fall back mentally and emotionally into the deep, soft folds of the rich sonic material and you can lose yourself completely.
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Image: Kyle Mortara under CC licence CC BY-NC 2.0
The sound was beautiful, rich and dreamy but, annoyingly, came in part from backing tapes. But what marked this show out was not how it sounded but how it looked. This was the most stunningly lit show I've ever seen.o edit.
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Image: Kyle Mortara under CC licence CC BY-NC 2.0
The staging was layered, allowing for textured lighting using on-stage fixed lights, moving video screens and blazes of intense colour. One breathtaking moment came when the stage darkened and pristine pin-pricks of white light moved slowly through the darkness towards the band, like being in the cockpit of a super slo-mo Millenium Falcon going into hyperspace.
​This was an ethereal, other-wordly show that required a change of mindset, commitment from the listener as well as the band.
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Eskies and Carthy bring nautical feel to Celtic Connections

18/2/2017

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The Eskies & Eliza Carthy / Celtic Connections / O2 ABC Glasgow / 2.2.17

Headliner Eliza Carthy had the night stolen from under her nose by support band The Eskies as both bands wheeled out brassy, raucous, piratey tunes for the sparse crowd gathered below the ABC’s giant glitterball.

The new generation of folkies like Carthy’s newly-assembled band and the likes of Bellowhead have a decidedly seafaring feel to them, with jaunty horns and lolling, salty grooves.

Carthy’s big slick 12-piece band made a rich and glorious noise and the erotic, lazy-hipped swagger of Big Machine was sleazily brilliant. But frankly it got boring pretty quickly, the songs melding together in a bit of a samey mush. An expensive-sounding, reasonably entertaining one, but a mush all the same.

The Ekies did better, though they were hardly a model of variety. Like a rum-soaked Chas and Dave they bounced and bobbed through a good-natured set of harmony-rich romps.

They are deft players and canny arrangers. Even though the trumpet and trombone were inaudible they had rich resources at their disposal: guitars, mandolin, bass, drums and four strong voices.

The big, pristine sound of a modern venue stripped them of some of the swaggering grit of their records and I would love to see them in a small whisky-doused back room somewhere, hollering and sweating and hanging from the rafters.

It helps to have an incredibly charming, funny, cheeky front man taking reviewers to task about the absurd things we say and admitting that they were running out of material rather than time.
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This was their first Scottish trip - look out for their next.

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Laura Marling and the unnecessary orchestra

21/1/2017

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Laura Marling and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Celtic Connections / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall / 19.1.17
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‘One night only’ collaborations are a curse, and one that festival organisers are particularly prone to inflicting on a loyal ticket-buying public.

Those involving symphony orchestras are worst of all - I’ve seen video of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and that kind of thing is hard to recover from. 

Bunging a hundred orchestral musicians behind a singer songwriter to make it sound all lush and lovely really doesn’t cut it. Yet it keeps happening - with Elbow, with Katie Melua, with Bob bleeding Dylan (old rockers like Aerosmith and Kiss are common offenders, and Sir Mix-A-Lot does better than most).

Laura Marling got the treatment in the opening night of Celtic Connections, with various other festival performers making up a rag-tag first half.

Marling is brilliant - an amazing player, a wonderful songwriter and strong, distinctive singer. She survived rather than thrived here, her powerful music untainted by the soupy, bland arrangements the orchestra piped over and under them. But the orchestral music existed in parallel to Marling’s largely unchanged songs. There was no interaction, no real collaboration, no intertwining of the musical strands. In which case you have to ask: what’s the point?

A series of Celtic Connections performers did a couple of songs each in the first half and none benefitted particularly from the big, soft, pillowy harmonic bed the orchestra provided. None fed off it, none changed their songs dramatically to accommodate it, none placed themselves in harmonic opposition to it to create some discordant tension.

I’m sure all those warm bodies sawing away on stage made some gig-goers felt like they were getting something special. But they weren’t, it was just a luxurious gimmick, a play act of specialness to mark the festival’s opening.

It wasn’t the orchestra’s fault, it was the fault of the conductor, festival organisers and arranger who allowed such rich musical resources to be put to such thin use.

This was apparent the second Declan O’Rourke took to the stage to close the first half. The music instantly sang - there was more richness, variety, tension and rhythmic complexity in the opening bars of one song than in the whole first half put together. You suddenly understood what a big orchestra can do for a singer, and though O’Rourke is no Sinatra I was reminded of the richness of something like the Count Basie Orchestra under Sinatra and how it provided contrast and counterpoint as well as support.

Well it turned out that O’Rourke had just finished a whole album with an orchestra. These were presumably arrangements he brought with him, the product of real, months-long collaboration and painstaking, detailed work. It shone.

Now I don’t know how long the arranger, who was lauded with multiple mentions and an invitation on stage, was given to do the work. Arranging more than a dozen songs for a full symphony orchestra is a lot of work and maybe the festival didn’t buy enough of her time for her to do it justice. Shame on them if that was the case.

More important is the question: why do bands and promoters keep doing this? It must be ego-massaging for performers: making like an old crooner in front of a huge orchestra is a sign you’re big time I suppose. And Celtic Connections probably wouldn’t have got away with a plain Laura Marling gig for the festival’s first show. It had to be an ‘opening night’. Festival staff probably found themselves using the word ‘gala’ at some point.

So you can understand how all involved can drift gig-wards without ever really asking themselves sternly enough: how are we going to make this work musically?

And you end up with a slightly cheesily compered show with lots of talk about the ‘fantastic’ orchestra, the ‘amazing’ arrangements, with a concert that talked about itself more than was seemly and an air of collective self-congratulation.

Maybe the excellent Karine Polwart did better, I was sadly late in and missed her. It is telling, though, that though Marling survived unscathed the highlight of the night was Rachel Sermanni, who wasn’t accompanied by the orchestra at all.

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Material, girl: Hannigan shines, the songs don't

1/11/2016

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Pic: Rich Gilligan
Lisa Hannigan / Oran Mor, Glasgow / 19 October 2016
​Lisa Hannigan returns after a five year absence with a fantastic new band and deft playing. It’s a shame her new material doesn’t match her performing talents. 

Lisa Hannigan has everything going for her – a golden voice, uncanny ability as an interpreter of songs, deep reserves of charm and easy, classy style. The one thing she could use is a better songwriting partner than current collaborator Aaron Dessner.

She is a wonderful performer and a literate, sensitive interpreter who can make mediocre songs good and good ones great, and with better material she would shine even more brightly. Her early work was catchy and could be beautiful, but it was too often lightweight, throwaway. Latest album At Swim lacks variety and in aiming for depth only achieves a derivative dullness.

I was greatly looking forward to hearing Hannigan sing after her five year hiatus from making albums and touring. Though listening to At Swim in the weeks leading up to the show had felt a bit like a chore, the minute Hannigan crept on stage I was transfixed again.

She came on alone and half-shy, began picking on a nylon string guitar and launched into two or three songs, mostly from second album Passenger, with a manic focus, throwing herself out at us, her eyes fixed and staring at the back wall, her body jerking and swaying with the effort of expression, her voice thick with emotion. It was an amazing performance, an audience-stilling exhibition of raw honesty.

For her early solo material Hannigan used the remnants of the band she was already in – Damien Rice's. That band was disintegrating anyway in the wake of her being sacked and it was an excellent outfit that had contributed enormously to Rice's initial blistering success.

She obviously learned a lesson or two about picking musicians and drilling them - Hannigan showed here that she has become a masterful band leader. For her all-male band she has picked three young players who sound like their background is more jazz than pop. The drummer, keys player and bass player were versatile, technically gifted and play brilliantly as a unit. But what made their sound so perfect are the tight arrangements, the taut precision of every unison note or syncopated cross-rhythm. This doesn't just happen, it is a sign that Hannigan is well aware how to convert the dull studio wizardry of At Swim into thrilling acoustic adventure. Though some of the songs still drag and sag, most from her new album are much improved here.

Another new development is the deft expertise of her own instrumental playing. Gone are the days when she strummed along or picked out odd notes. She is sure-fingered and eloquent on guitar, mandolin and ukulele, all the while singing complex lines with perfect intonation and heartbreakingly musical phrasing.

As a music critic in Dublin I watched Hannigan emerge as part of that superb Rice band. I have seen her command the main stage of music festivals and heard her sing unamplified in a room with six other people, and I'm not sure I have heard many better singers. She hits each note exactly where she wants to, which isn’t always dead centre. Her tone is as hauntingly beautiful as it is unique, and her control and technique are masterful.

But sometimes she falters, and this might explain why she has made less of an impact than she could have. Tonight she misses out some strong material, including her only claim to anything like a hit, I Don't Know, which a loyal audience surely craved. The set is short and her diverting chat is almost entirely absent. It's a fine show but someone of her talent should be able to send every crowd home thinking they've just seen the gig of the year.

It reminded me of a moment from her emergence as a solo act in 2009. She played Oran Mor that year too, holding the audience spellbound, combining immense personal charm with a display of controlled anguish and whimsical melancholy that left the Glasgow crowd besotted.

I had interviewed her earlier and arranged for a film crew to shoot her and the band playing two songs for the newspaper's website. She sang acoustically in the wood-panelled, couch-bedecked dressing room with her band for an audience of the small film crew and me and it was spellbindingly beautiful, one of the absolute highlights of my life in music.

Just a fortnight later she played breakthrough hit I Don’t Know on Jools Holland’s TV show, a huge coup - this is a show that makes careers. Jools Holland’s audience were her people, this was her time. I thought she would go over incredibly well on TV and make her name, and I remember sitting on the edge of the couch watching it, willing her to show the world what she had.

But she didn’t. She choked, seeming nervous and introverted, her sublime, deeply moving voice shaky and reedy, her charm evaporating under the heat of the TV lamps.

It felt then like there was some invisible rope holding her back from achieving what she could. It still feels like it. She has talked about having writer's block in the run up to At Swim and perhaps it is just a case of choosing a collaborator capable of better than Dessner's sub-Bon Iver mood music.

Hannigan is still a joy to watch and someone with an extraordinary ability to make a song come alive. It is reassuring that someone who ploughs their own furrow like her and has a distinctive, slightly odd style can still make a living in music. But Hannigan is not making the most of her considerable gifts and we should all hope she chooses a better songwriting partner next time.
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CW Stoneking: discordant resonances

31/10/2016

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CW Stoneking / 24 June 2016 / CCA Glasgow
CW Stoneking is part comic-throwback, part-Tom Waits carnival barking tribute, part moving crooning troubadour. His show was wry, entertaining and had moments of mellifluous, enveloping beauty. 

He dresses as if on a plantation and both he and the band play what look like 1930s period instruments. At times the concerted efforts to create an old-timey feel bring the show dangerously close to novelty act territory but there were enough moments of rhythmic swagger and harmonic invention to prove that Stoneking has more to offer musically than pastiche. 

For a show dedicated to the music of times of intense political struggles, particularly on issues of race, there was a bit too much talk of 'the jungle' and too many tracks that relied on a tom-tom parody of African music from old Hollywood films for my liking. Maybe I was being over-sensitive. 
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There was beautiful music here - Handyman, On A Desert Isle and Jungle Paradise shone. But there were too many unresolved questions rattling around my head about Stoneking's careless use of imagery, stories and sounds of a troubled recent history seemingly without appreciating the resonance of them, for me to comfortably enjoy the music in isolation.
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A siren sings to an audience that could fit in a people carrier

14/6/2016

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ALA.NI captivates a crowd she knows by name. Pic: Graham Black @Graham_Black
PictureALA.NI and her vintage mic Pic: Graham Black @Graham_Black
While the world copies Beyonce who's copying Whitney who’s copying Aretha, the annoyingly named but sublimely gifted ALA.NI has breathed soulful new life into an unfashionable style of singing: artful, controlled and ludicrously expressive.

Sweaty, sleazy soul is a wonderful thing. Listen to Aretha Franklin's breakthrough work with the oily funk of the Muscle Shoals Band and I defy you not to squirm in your office chair with bodily delight. It's hot, it's scratchily humid, it's a sonic miracle.

But so many  bad copies have been made that the originals are at risk. So ALA.NI has stepped away from her career slinging harmonies for Mary J Blige and Blur and has revived an untrendy, stagey sound. She's the reincarnation of Deitrich, Day and Hepburn and it's sublime.

When she sings, every consonant is perfectly placed, an arch syncopation dotting the most everyday phrases. ALA.NI is capable of enunciating like a New England ice queen while stroking a note like Ella Fitzgerald. Her tales of loving manipulation and earnest cheating drip with rich contempt and aching defiance but the delivery is old-fashioned, controlled and haughty.

For a long time probably the least cool thing in entertainment has been to admit that you've been to stage school. Singing like you're in a musical is a no-no even if you're actually in one.

ALA.NI went to stage school and sings like she's the star of a 1950s revue. She preens over her notes, taking ostentatious time and care to get each one exactly right. There is no pretence here that this is unschooled emotion straight from the soul. She is giving a performance and giving in completely to the artifice, the fakery and the controlled theatricality of her craft.

ALA.NI's recorded music is pretty but samey. In a large arena or a stadium it might melt into a profitable sonic blancmange of Adele proportions. But in an embarrassingly poorly attended gig (I go to better-attended office meetings several times a week: she charmingly invites everyone to introduce themselves a couple of songs in. 'Hi, I'm Tom') with just a guitar for accompaniment it becomes magical. To be so close to someone who make such perfect sound is an almost-religious experience. Her large frame extends out beyond the stage, seemingly to touch us all. Her controlling confidence urges surrender to her charming sonic whims. Her every perfectly-annunciated, archly-crafted note marks her out as a master of the manipulation and uplifting delusion needed to carry an audience of strangers into your most intimate musings.

This is alchemy: the taking of slightly-samey retro folk and the conversion of it into something close to a cult. On another night in a bigger venue with rain dripping outside and a babysitter to rush home to maybe it would have been just good. In a near-empty King Tut's one Glasgow summer evening it was somewhere close to perfect.

http://www.ala.ni/ 

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ALA.NI: spellbinding. Pic: Graham Black @Graham_Black
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A long hot journey into indulgence, with Neil Young

13/6/2016

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This review was published in The Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2016 

​Neil Young is still campaigning, still railing with passion if not precision at corporate threats to everything from farming to energy supplies to the quality of our audio files. But do the indulged passions of a 70 year old rock star make for a compelling show?

Thousands in Glasgow's Hydro thought so and paid devoted, roaring respect to a hero. Nonetheless, early signs were not good.

This tour promotes a protest album about agribusiness behemoth Monsanto which also carries a dig at Starbucks for good measure. As his young band joined him after a solo start, two figures in farming hats and denims walked across the stage spreading seeds while the big screen showed a picture of a daisy. A few songs later sinister figures in gleaming biohazard suits sprayed the ground in a decidedly evil manner. It was not subtle stuff.

Other indulgences were on display. Songs grew longer the later in the set they appeared. A fuzzy intro and a brief snatch of singing was typically followed by five minutes or more of leg-splayed posing and stomping to the squealing guitar wanderings of Young and his two guitarists, sons of his friend Willie Nelson.

Young has long been a noise merchant but the lack of fretboard discipline would shame a prog rocker or metal hero. Songs lasted ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes. Young has a distinctive soloing style and sound - it can be jagged, attack-filled and thrilling. But it can also be languid and meandering, and excitement fades as the minutes drift by.

As a celebration of the hypnotic power of repetitive, throbbing noise, Young's approach sometimes worked. The bone-shaking cadence of Love And Only Love - whose final winding-up was longer than most pop songs - felt like the grave pealing of distorted, doom-laden bells. The solemn repetition of single heavy notes was artful and moving, but the guitar histrionics produced too few of these moments.

A different Young had opened the concert. Alone behind piano or guitar he rattled through earlier, folkier hits like After The Gold Rush and Heart Of Gold. His voice had lost much of its power but had gained a wispy mournfulness. It was a moving contrast to the strident young man of the recordings, but the performances here felt rushed, something to get through to reach the noisy indulgence of the following two hours.
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    Matthew has reviewed, interviewed and opined about music for many newspapers.

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