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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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ALABAMA 3 ACOUSTIC
AND UNPLUGGED
The Roundhouse, London, August 12th 2008 |
| We’re
back at the Roundhouse for another of their series
of intimate nightclub-style evenings. I guess the
thinking behind these is that it’s difficult
to fill a big venue in August – what with
the holidays, and multiple festivals every weekend.
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the formula isn’t quite right here. In the
first place, as I have said before, you simply
can’t make the Roundhouse seem small. Then
the layout is all wrong – we’re at
tables, but they’re not nightclub tables,
they’re function (or even, dare I say it,
‘banquet’) tables. There are six of
us around a table big enough for a dozen, and
any self- respecting nightclub owner would have
us at a table a third of the size. So there’s
almost more table than people, and the atmosphere
suffers accordingly. Not that Jozzer, Trizza and
the rock-chicks seem to mind as they work their
way through bottle after bottle of pink and rather
tasteless wine (“It was hot” says
Jozzer a few days later, as if that’s an
excuse) . But Alabama
3’s Larry Love does. “I
don’t play no motherfucking chicken in the
basket shit for you motherfuckers” he splutters,
to the delight of a largely adoring audience,
“motherfucking chicken in the fucking basket
gigs!” he snorts to himself with amiable
derision. |
From top to bottom:
Larry Love, Rock Freebase, Nick Reynolds
aka Harpo Strangelove and Devlin Love |
| Readers
may remember that when we last saw Mr Love with
his full band he seemed, let us say, somewhat the
worse for wear, so I’m delighted to report
that the Roundhouse, intimate or not, witnessed
him with his acoustic outfit, in scintillating form,
even if his newly-acquired grey beard did give him
an unexpected (and not very long-lasting) aura of
venerable gravitas. The acoustic band are as good
as ever, driven by Rock Freebase’s pulsating
slide guitar and Nick Reynold’s harmonica.
I have to say the guitar playing is as simple and
uncluttered as it could be, ‘though I don’t
quite know how Mr Freebase manages it (have a look
here
to see). The charmingly diminutive Devlin Love’s
powerhouse vocals give the quartet additional drive
as they work their way through a set including ‘Converted’,
‘Woke up this morning’. Johnny Cash’s
‘Folsom Prison Blues’, ‘Bullet
proof’ (“for all the ladies with Saturday
night specials in the audience”), ‘Two
heads’, ‘U don’t dance 2 techno’,
‘Too sick to pray’, ‘Let the caged
bird sing’, ‘Up above my head’,
‘Monday don’t mean anything to me’
and ‘Johnny Cash’, at which point I
gave up taking notes, largely due to the genteel
mayhem that was breaking out around me. Oh yes –
and there was an encore including ‘Love will
tear us apart’, not perhaps the best choice. |
| And
thinking about it, great fun though it was, the
gig could have been unremarkable had it not been
for the orange-juice-drinking Mr Love’s garrulous
good humour. He had a lot to say on a variety of
everyday subjects: binge-drinking women (could he
have been looking at our table – by this time
the girls had given up glasses and were using straws?);
the hugely irritating and perky pop-chanteuse Kate
Nash; MDMA (‘Monday don’t mean anything
to me’); bi-polar disorder; not surprisingly
Johnny Cash (the A3 have contributed a track to
Johnny
Cash Remixed, produced by John Carter Cash and
for release in October), and of course God (it seems
Love, aka Rob Spragg was brought up in a Mormon
household, or so I read somewhere recently). |
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And it’s funny to hear Love’s gloriously
improbably southern American accent descend into
his native Welsh brogue (he was brought up in various
south Wales Valley towns). And when he gets really
excited (perhaps it’s his medication) he can
barely get all the words in his head out of his
mouth. He is thoroughly captivating, ending the
evening navigating between the tables, encouraging
members of the audience to attempt Johnny Cash impersonations.
Sometimes you just want to go out and have some
honky-tonking fun, and simple though it is, it really
doesn’t come much better than this. - Nick
Morgan (photographs by Kate) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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