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The girl in the loo at the 100 Club said Johnathan Rice wasn't usually like this. "I have seen him three times this month and he was really funny." The girl next to her sighed, "But he is a poet... and he is good looking." Whatever - as they say on the OC where Rice's So Sweet scored a big hit with audiences - tonight One Little Indian's baby-faced saviour of alt.rock was in no mood for laughing, not that the girls out front in blonde highlights and halter tops cared.
Rice has been given the Hollywood OK: soundtracked on Six Feet Under as well as the OC, he is to star (as Roy Orbison) in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line with Joaquin Phoenix. His first album, Trouble is Real, has led to comparisons with Ryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and Gram Parsons. He obviously enjoys the comparisons - what 22-year-old wouldn't? He finished the set face turned to heaven, eyes screwed shut and hands clasped in front, a denim clad choir boy singing Parsons' classic Hickory Wind.
Rice's banter was less angelic. "Shut up!" he screamed towards the bar, where the punters failed to appreciate a stripped down set that provided a perfect showcase for his prematurely aged voice and earnest lyrics. Before a powerful unplugged rendition of Mother's Son, he sarkily asked: "Is it okay with you guys if I sing a song?" This seems a point lost on increasingly noisy London audiences: you go to gigs to listen, not to chatter to friends about how good looking the singer is, or your new mobile phone.
If they had shut up they would have heard a singer whose ambitious lyricism belies his age and whose sombre mood reflected a sad day in London - earlier many of us had gathered in silence to remember the city's heart being ripped open by bombers. He kicked off with the eloquently defiant City of Fire. The darkness lifted as his band Death Valley joined in for the gospel Put Me In You Holy Water, prompting the guy next to me to ask, "Is he religious?"
Well, there is something of God and Jesus about the Glasgow-raised Virginian that made me think it wasn't just remembrance of things past that left him so downbeat. Like the God Squad, he takes himself too seriously. After Holy Water the mood headed downhill as he ran through the album from Mid-November to I Wouldn't Miss It For The World. Only on So Sweet did the tempo move upbeat, raising a cheer from the OC fans seated front row.
But it was a short-lived fillip in a set constantly in danger of drifting into solipsism and lacking differentiation, which is why he failed to silence those around the bar. Rice has presence, is pretty and precociously talented, but on the evidence of this set, rather than the word of the girl in the loo, he needs to let go of the angst and allow himself to have a good time now and again if he is to keep the audience from losing interest.
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