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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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CONCERT
REVIEW by Nick Morgan
RODDY FRAME Shepherd’s
Bush Empire, London, June 2nd, 2006
It’s
a warm Friday night in London, and the Bush is
strangely only half full. The restive audience
chat their way through support Martha Tilston’s
set, and become even noisier during the interval.
With a single microphone stand up front and in
the middle it looks like a big old stage, and
I’m beginning to wonder how anyone can really
fill it just by themselves, let alone command
the attention of this increasingly boisterous
bunch. I shouldn’t have worried. From the
moment Roddy
Frame walks on stage he has the audience
in the palm of his hand – at times the quiet
is astonishing (during a very hushed lull between
songs a fan shouts out, earning the rebuke “Look
man, can’t you just enjoy the silence, it’s
beautiful man”). Frame calms down a fight
at the front of the crowd, takes a love poem from
an outstretched hand, begins to read it, begins
to critique it (“one blue would have been
enough man”) and then refuses to finish
it – “just buy her something expensive
man”. He tells a wonderful joke about nut
roasts, and a familiar apocryphal Glaswegian story
about knife wounds. |
| Altogether
he’s engaged and engaging, and when, right
at the end of the show he says “I’ve
had a lovely time playing for you” you know
it’s true. You almost felt you could have
been sitting at home with Roddy on the sofa playing
and chatting while his pal the wonderful Edwyn Collins
(who was sitting not far from us) retuned all his
guitars into unplayable tunings (another funny story). |
| And
all that despite the fact that Frame is un peu pissed
off. He knows why the place isn’t full –
we all do. “Who’d have thought the two
laziest, most shiftless poets in Scotland would
end up playing in London on the same night”
he complains. He’s talking about Paul Buchanan,
who with what’s left of Blue Nile is playing
at the Barbican as he speaks. Now it’s true
that between 1983 and 2006 Frame, as Aztec Camera
or solo has only produced nine albums, but that
compares poorly to Blue Nile’s four albums
over a similar period. Moreover, whilst Frame is
a relatively regular visitor to the Capital’s
stages Buchanan and the band tour only rarely and
are guaranteed to sell out. In fact I cursed myself
having bought tickets for Frame when I later saw
that Buchanan was going to be in town, and even
more so when I saw the five star reviews he picked
up for the three nights they played in Glasgow.
But I should have had a little more faith in Roddy. |
 |
Born
in that monument to Scotland’s post-war planning
frenzy, East Kilbride, young Roddy was something
of a prodigy, and was only nineteen when Aztec Camera
registered their first hit with ‘Oblivious’.
Initially stable mates with Collin’s Orange
Juice, Aztec Camera were at the forefront of a marvellous
mini-renaissance in Scottish rock and roll. While
the band lasted through ‘till 1996 it had
for many years been nothing more than a showcase
for Frame’s song writing skills, with a restless
throughput of musicians. Since then he’s been
a ‘solo’ performer, receiving rave reviews
for his ‘solo’ acoustic album Surf (2002)
and deservedly for the recently released Western
Skies. |
| And
tonight he’s performing a set of songs largely
from this later period but with a fair helping of
older material – particularly most of the
Camera’s hit tunes from the 1983 album High
Land, Hard Rain. Now in case you don’t know
you shouldn’t expect anything earth shattering
in Frame’s subject matter – his songs
are largely about love, unrequited love, lost love,
guilty love, the pleasures of love, the pains of
love and, err… more love. But he twists this
well trodden path round with wonderfully constructed
lyrics, never too clever or contrived, but perfectly
crafted, with the help, I observe, of a great deal
of well chosen weather and sea related imagery. |
| Frame
has three lovely acoustic guitars (one a monster
of a twelve stringer) whose sound is fantastic.
He moves easily between finger picking and plectrum
styles, with hints of flamenco thrown in for good
measure. He stalks around the stage, full of energy,
covering as much ground as a five piece band and
his voice is almost perfect (listen to his singing
on Surf or Western Skies – it’s as good
as that). Kicking off with ‘The sea is wide’
from his first solo effort ‘North Star’,
we get ‘Small World’, ‘Black Lucia’.
‘Dry land’ and then “two songs
that didn’t make it onto the Surf album, but
I think they’re better than anything that
did”, ‘Your smile can’t stop the
hands of time’ and ‘Crossing Newbury
Street’. A little later we get a handful of
tunes from the new album, ‘Rock God’
(“I started writing this song when I was watching
a television programme about Marc Bolan”),
‘Western Skies’ and ‘Worlds in
Worlds’, and then the truly memorable ‘How
men are’. |
 |
| The
tempo rises as he moves into hit mode with songs
like ‘Oblivious’ and ‘Somewhere
in my heart’ as his first encore, but he finishes
with two from North Star, ‘Hymn to Grace’
and ‘Reason for Living’. The audience
don’t want him to go, but after 22 songs and
an hour and a half of heavy duty guitar playing
I think the guy deserves a rest. |
|
This was a truly impressive show with everything
that you could have wanted. And afterwards I began
to think, how would you score it? To be sure there’s
the immediate sense of pleasure, the visceral feeling
that only live music can give you, there’s
a bit of emotion, pathos and laughter, a few thought
provoking lyrics. And that might get you up to an
immediate score in the high eighties. But that’s
not really a true reflection of the impact of the
evening. There’s only a week and an Islay
Whisky Festival between them, but I’m still
thinking about Josh Rouse’s great gig at the
Bush as if I’ve only just left. And of course
if I care to I can easily conjure up the sense of
awe that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds generated at
Brixton Academy or for that matter can put myself
in a seat in Birmingham Town Hall watching Family
back in the 1970s. So there’s another criterion
to think of – the gigs that give something
that never leaves you. And I think you can tell
at the time which ones they are – like Roddy
Frame tonight. And you know, you simply can’t
give enough points to that, or put a value on it.
But I know it’s worth a lot more than a fifteen
quid ticket. Thanks Roddy. - Nick Morgan (photographs
by Kate) |
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the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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