Bon Iver and Iron and Wine The Glasgow ABC

It’s a well known fact that Glasgow is more stylish than Edinburgh. In Edinburgh anything more flamboyant than a jeans/t-shirt combo in muted beige screams raving queen to the forward thinking Auld Reekie style police. Now Glasgow is a different animal altogether- embracing all things au courant, from skinny jeans to curly perms. And that’s just the lads. No surprises then that Glasgow outdid herself when the nouveau folk style gauntlet was thrown down by Monday’s much anticipated Iron and Wine/Bon Iver gig. The Glasgow ABC was awash with a fine array of magnificent beards. By the looks of things some definitely started when tickets went on sale 2 months ago, but even the style lightweights were sporting a tributary couple of days growth. The question is, did our visiting folksters deserve their fuzzy homage? The answer is, yes and no.

The Bon Iver album For Emma, forever ago was released here last Monday, but if you’ve been anywhere near the internet since its US release you will have undoubtedly already heard it. The album is like a quiet spooky cry in the darkness, so it was weird that the first thing that struck me on Monday was how loud it was- you know, more of a big loud wail in the darkness. The audience seemed kind of stunned at being allowed to see something so, well, soul baring. By the time Skinny love ended we were all in love. When we were asked to sing the refrain of ‘what might have been lost’ on Wolves, I tell you, I felt like one on those hippies in the John Mills Quatermass mini series, having a semi hysterical mass religious experience. The only downside is that after promising us 2 more songs the gig suddenly ended, and before my favourite song Re-Stacks. Short as it was though, it was going to be a pretty hard act to follow. Still, Iron and Wine started off pretty well with some nice acoustic numbers, they even played my favourite leaving Japan song ‘Passing afternoon’ which definitely brought a ‘that was then but this is now’ tear to my eye. Sadly my favourite song also heralded the arrival of the band which turned out to be their undoing. It put me in mind of when me and V.23 went to see Michelle Shocked in Preston after the Campfire tapes came out and the whole thing was smothered by a thick layer of crap band- plodding drums, boring arrangements, 70s electric piano, you know the kind of thing. I guess the moral of the story is that if you get yourself a pub band to play with you, you will sound like, well you know, a pub band. Let the Phoenix Nights version of the Proclaimer’s Letter from America be a lesson to us all. Suffice it to say, Iron and Wine’s band took away more than they gave, drowning all that delicate prettiness in a sea of bland. To make it worse, they were given more and more noodling time as the night wore on, which left the audience scratching their beards and wondering (as Justin Vernon might) about what might have been lost, and wishing we could get him back for the songs we had missed.

Nouvelle Vague

The Queens Hall Edinburgh 10th February 2008

So this might come as a bit of a surprise given my recent bitching about cover versions; a night out with Parisian style merchants- Nouvelle Vague. The premise is pretty simple- 80s new wave and post punk classics done in a bossa-nova style. (Nouvelle vague means New wave in French and bossa-nova in Portuguese- now that is one big box of coincidence.) My bitching was pretty much Radio One’s fault- fresh off the back of the success of 2006’s Live Lounge album, the bloated old media cockers at the beeb made the fairly predictable mistake of flogging a dead horse until it’s lifeless bloody stump fell, and then froze, stiff as a board in the newly fallen snow, like they do in the frozen wastes of Siberia. The result (after a long year listening to that shit everyday on the radio) was the unspeakable dirge that is Live Lounge 2; a dreadful shambolic collection of badly chosen, craply arranged and mostly piss poor covers of modern songs. I could go on but just have a listen and tell me if you don’t want to pour brandy in your ears by the end of it. The point is, I’m not against covers per se (in fact I feel a top ten covers list coming on...) and I’m even a fan of the single style covers bands- Richard Cheese (lounge), Brian Seltzer Orchestra (Rockabilly), the mighty Dread Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin reggae style by an Elvis impersonator), so my appearance at the Nouvelle Vague concert wasn’t really that surprising. When I got there though, I suddenly had misgivings. The Queen’s hall is a soulless venue at the best of times, and this was an Edinburgh 30 something crowd on a Sunday night. Not a group known for dressing up as dancers from les folies bergere whilst knocking back absinthe, smoking cigars and having seedy sexual encounters before the consumption gets them. The mood was sombre, with an undercurrent of ‘this better be finished by 10.30 cause I’ve gotta get home to iron my work blouse’. It was a pretty slow starter too, in spite of the band being fronted by two gorgeous women. It didn’t take them too long to win us over though, and by the time The Dead Kennedy’s Too Drunk to Fuck came around, we were all well and truly smitten. You just couldn’t stay frosty in the face of all that good natured, uncontrived sexiness, and the most curious selection of 80s songs never to be heard on Radio Norwich. The old goth in me was in Nostagia heaven, with songs from The Lords of the New Church (Dance with me), The Cramps (Human fly), The Sisters of Mercy (Marian), Killing Joke (Psyche), The Cure (A Forest) and the piece de resistance Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s dead. All mixed down with smooth lounginess and bossa-nova beats the audience were pretty much transfixed well before the first encore. And although no one cracked open the absinthe, we left the concert feeling hot and fuzzy inside, and I wasn't the only one lighting a fat imaginary cigar as I left the building.