Mojo - The Music Magazine

IT WAS, AS ONE-MAN blues hurricane Son Of Dave rightly pointed out, a weird time for a gig. And midnight-to-six man James Hunter later admitted that it was unusual for him even to be out of his kip of a lunchtime. Yet for the working stiffs of London’s Oxford Street, MOJO staff included, it was a welcome interruption of the quotidian grind, especially on a day when the heavens opened and the streets submerged from dawn to dusk.

It was yesterday, the hour 12.30 and a bit and MOJO had an Honours List to launch. The occasion: the announcement of nominations for our annual awards ceremony (Breakthrough Act Pete Molinari would play later in the day). Also an opportunity to proffer an unapologetic salute to Mark E. Smith and The Fall, destined to receive a shiny MOJO Maverick Award when the Honours List ceremony proper happens in June. Not to mention an excuse to royally kick out the jams while loading up on CDs from HMV.

“Don’t go back to work drunk and blame it on me,” warned Son Of Dave, starting the festivities with a set of earthy blues rants, soundtracked by scalp-raising fuzz-harp and live-sampled human beatboxing. “Shall I do something non-funky?” he asked the crowd. “Nooooo!” they replied, which was just as well.

Next up: the passion and playfulness of James Hunter, whose revivification of classic-soul values is even more potent live than it is on new album The Hard Way, thanks in the main to a virtuoso voice that yesterday rocked between the creamy Sam Cooke tones of the ska-flecked Carina and the full-on R&B filth of The 5 Royales’ 1953 soul blueprint Baby Don’t Do It.

Hunter’s been doing this kind of thing for 20-odd years, first as Howlin’ Wilf, so perhaps there should be no surprise at his command. In the centre of his band’s funky stew, the quiffed-up pocket battleship skipped and twitched, grinned and gurned, now delighted by a Hammond tickle or sax curlicue, now digging into his Les Paul Junior to pop off percussive guitar solos of potted invention and derangement. Just one piece of advice, James: if you’re going to insist on introducing your band, please in future try to remember their names.

A great start to our launch day, and too bad in a way that the reality of afternoon graft had to intervene. While the enforced hiatus sent a legion of soul converts back into the rain, HMV became a record shop again, before reawakening, Brigadoon-style, with the first plangent strokes of Pete Molinari’s acoustic guitar at 6pm sharp(ish).

Molinari’s supreme confidence as a performer is now marked, the dapper little fellow with the luxuriant eyelashes and surely inevitable Brylcreem endorsement comfortable delivering spellbinding bluesfolk introversion or out-and-out preBeatles rocking. Last night in a Tennesse Two-style formation featuring electric guitar and bull fiddle backup, he essayed the exquisite Sweet Louise off new album A Virtual Landslide and closed appropriately with a rollicking Folsom Prison Blues. As everyone was heard to utter afterwards: what a voice – straightahead pure and bell-like like no male singer in decades.

The Fall hordes were now swiftly filling HMV, fired by Mark E Smith’s recent media surfacings, where – promoting his new autobiography with unusual assiduousness – he’s seemed uniformly gay and amused. Yet Fall fans are used to their icon’s resemblance to the Old Testament deity: vengeful and whimsical, commanding loyalty and obeisance for sometimes scant reward. Meeting him earlier in the day, MOJO found him chatty and enjoyed the full details of “squirrelgate” (“I was on page 3 of the Daily Mail! PETA sent me death threats”), but we know enough to have kept all digits crossed for the evening’s shenanigans.

We needn’t have worried. Bemused (thank God) rather than insulted by our offer of 2008’s MOJO Maverick Award, the Good Mark had turned up, and from the moment the staccato guitar ’n’ squeally synth assault had begun, and the first smoggy vowels had been expelled from the Smith maw, it seemed clear that a night of vintage Fall excitement was in store. Majoring on tunes from the new album, Imperial Wax Solvent – Latch Key Kid, I’ve Been Duped and 50 Year Old Man were all aired – the band were just the right Fall mix of threatening, self-hypnotised and scared out of their wits.

Meanwhile, the weird bright light of the notorious “record shop gig” played into the obsessive Smith-watcher’s hands, with each tic and grimace of the frontman spotlit for the delectation of aficionados. When not headbanging to the relentless riffing, one could enjoy watching Smith fiddle with his guitarists’ amplifiers, or use and reject each (identical-sounding) microphone in turn. When each had been either broken, unplugged, lost or deliberately stuffed through the front port of the bass drum, it was time to go. Exeunt, The Fall.

“I’m a 50-year-old man,” Smith had sung amid the above-mentioned track, “and I like it.” On this form, you can believe him.

Review by: Danny Eccleston

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Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 2:11 PM GMT 01/05/2008