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The Troubadour Club on Old Brompton Road is a venue steeped in history.
Folk legends from Bob Dylan to Janis Joplin have graced its
tiny stage.
With private booths in which you can slip into the shadows, bar-room
tables and comfy benches, it should be a Boho venue par excellence, making
it all the more irritating that tonight's admission is only gained after a
pointless altercation with the jobsworth door monkey who insists the press
list is closed until his 'manager' (who looks suspiciously like the barman)
tells him otherwise. Eventually, musicOMH is ushered into the small and at
this stage still mostly empty venue only to have missed half of first act
Ed Valance.
This is a pity, as acoustic Ed and his plugged in buddy Simon are
peddling country-tinged guitar pop in between bickering entertainingly like
an old married couple. Ed looks like a younger and even more mad-eyed Wayne
Coyne (which is no bad thing) with a voice that alternates between adenoidy
Dylan and high-pitched falsetto, both of which manage to remain very
pleasantly harmonious amid spaghetti western riffs.
They're followed by Declan O'Rourke, whose self-assured confidence
makes it clear he's used to playing in front of crowds much larger than the
150 or so he's performing for tonight. Full of stage banter informing the
audience that Paul Weller choosing Galileo as the song he wished
he'd written makes him feel, "Well... weller", he plays new album Beyond
Kyabram track for track, along the way apologising for the naffness of Love
Is The Way only as an excuse to get the audience to sing along.
The intimate setting is a good advert for the juxtaposition of delicate
strength found all across the album, his deep voice carrying well in the
enclosed space. Even in front of this crowd, he can pull off tracks that
sound like Crowded House or the Beautiful South as well as
those that could be ancient hymns plucked from a twisted folk past. He
thanks Jonathan Ross for already playing new single No Brakes (out on
October 30th) and finishes, superbly unaccompanied, on Marrying The Sea Til
Death Do Us Part - a great advert for the strength of his voice.
O'Rourke would be a hard act for anyone to follow, and unfortunately
Angus and Julia aren't really up to the task. Their cutesy country falls
just the wrong side of tweeness and Julia, in her '50s picket-fence dress and
plastic hair band comes across too much like Cerys Matthews doing
June Carter on a Stars In Their Eyes celebrity special. The addition
of trumpets and the odd harmonica add to the sense of quirkiness for the
sake of it and though Julia's little-girl-smoking-60-a-day breathiness is
interesting, it's not enough. A large criticism is that there's not a lot of
difference between one song and the next - some repetition in their set may
have given it more depth.
In a small venue in front of barely more than a few dozen audience, Angus
and Julia just about work but in a larger one they may not, although they're
pleasant enough, a decent addition to the country-folk Troubadour tradition.
For final song Here We Go Again, a Monkees-ish pop sensibility seems
to sneak in just under the ribbon. If they could build on this for the
future, they may be on to something.
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