MUSIC

Hippodrome, Bristol (Tue 15 Nov)

“I learnt this from Doc Watson,” she says, before breaking into the ageless flatpicker’s ‘Weary Blues’. Gillian Welch is American roots royalty herself these days, of course, even if it doesn’t feel all that long since she was peering through a fug of airborne nicotine at the Hen & Chicken (next time around, at Fiddlers, she made sure to pre-empt the smoking ban).

The first set is plied with just two guitars, plus occasional banjo and harmonica. Then, after the intermission, they... come back and do it all again. Quite right – there’s nothing here they couldn’t play from the back of a truck. And in any case, the light and shade is all in the songs – no call for leaden-footed drummers or sedentary sessioneers trampling over everything here. Blissful.

Yes, OK, so David Rawlings is a virtuoso guitarist, but those dextrous runs only ever serve the song, never ostentatiously dominate it. Alongside Welch he finds a musical disposition in perfect symmetry: no overripe twang, no vocal gymnastics, and that despite a voice layered deep, pure and natural as Colorado mountain run-off. The song is written, and she just sings it. And, boy, is it ever written. Like a songwriter wandering into the middle of a Cormac McCarthy novel, Welch crafts lines every bit as spare, vivid and, ultimately, devastating. “This one’s a little faster,” she smiles, encouragingly. “It’s not really any happier,” says Rawlings, drily. “At all.” Cue ‘The Way It Goes’, and a heroin OD in the first verse.

A gig this good humoured and transfixing turns a cavernous venue into a place no less intimate than that Bristol debut. Until the standing ovation at the end, at any rate. Proper-job ovation, too, not an incremental oh-go-on-then-if-we-really-must, but all rising as one. An encoring ‘I’ll Fly Away’ (aka That One From ‘O Brother...’) brings another so warm and sincere that, were it not for a raising of the house lights, it might still be going now. (Julian Owen)

Copyright Julian Owen 2011; Pic copyright Claire Flint, www.claireflint.com 2011