Posh is the new Black. Witness the puerile, catastrophic decision by Labour activists to dress up and parade around as Lord Snooty at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election last year, effectively trebling the Conservative majority. Karl Marx and Arthur Scargill could have told them wearily: class war doesn’t cut it in England.
Which is good news for all of the acts on tonight’s bill, as there are plenty of cut-glass accents on display, and in one case, a charming haziness about where the M40 leads (“Oh, somewhere in the North”). I’m not sure any of the acts would be totally at home in King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, but fortunately we’re at the Wheatsheaf, with most of the audience sat expectantly on the floor, as if they’re waiting on the latest instalment of Prince Caspian from a fluffy primary school teacher.
First up is a nervous, spectacled, studenty singer-songwriter called Max, who performs as King of Cats. But he has an ace in the hole: a second microphone hooked up to a ring oscillator, which turns his gentle, slightly effete singing voice into a Clanger-ish hoot. He is comically unable to control the pitch, but who cares when you’re getting Big Laughs? Every time you do it!
As a songwriter, his style reminds me a little of the short-story writer Saki: there’s a vein of misanthropy and waspishness lurking under the studious John Major mildness:
“Replace a wife with a dog. You don’t need to listen to what a Labrador says”
The King hooks up profitably on one song with the Queen of the Mountain Parade, Roxy, and I’d like to hear more of this, as the sound they get, while retaining simplicity, is deeper and sweeter than when he plays on his own. Altogether, the set was a nervous, eccentric triumph, with at least two promoters in the audience keen to book him.
Tamara Parsons-Baker has caused a certain amount of spilled ink on this website recently, due to a middling review of her debut demo a month ago. Tonight’s performance was equally divisive, with one scenester whom I respect snorting about ‘standard singer-songwriter fare’. I quite enjoyed the set, but I’m not sure that solo performance is really her medium.
First thing is to say is that Parsons-Baker’s voice is superb. She is not one for dull naturalism, performing with a restless, operatic delivery, at times almost hectoring, at others glassily pure. It’s almost as if she isn’t a singer-songwriter at all, but rather a Grace Slick rock chick awaiting the backing band of her dreams. The acoustic guitar, played perfectly effectively on numbers like ‘To Possess”, is sometimes almost inadequate as a foil for her stormy vocal rhetoric.
Her lyrics are like mines in a meadow. For the most part, they are pleasant but unmemorable but then some neuronal explosion gives us the vision of some insane poet (must be Swinburne- he was a total nutter) “stabbing a be-titted figurine in the groin with a pin”. Now either this is the worst line ever written, or a breath-taking work of staggering genius. Whatever it is, it has no place in the repertoire of a nice, well brought up singer-songwriter. Which is why we’ll keep watching her.
Finally, to The Mountain Parade, our favourite octet of work-shy English students, purveying heavenly little nuggets of Belle and Sebastian feyness, held together loosely by their new drummer, and singer Roxy’s all-conquering niceness. Although they still need to do a whip-round for a tuner, they are considerably tighter than the amiable duffers who turned up at last year’s Winter Warmer, and the songs seem more substantial than before, with their paean to fictional explorer Shackleton Beaulieux a singalong standout. The band, a jazzy gaggle of trumpeters, ukulelists (sp?), fiddlers and cellists have learnt the art of playing sympathetically behind a frontwoman with a very small voice (what she lacks in decibels, she makes up for in charm and bonhomie)-this is one of the hardest things to do when there are so many of you, so plaudits all round. I’d like to hear the cellist play a bit lower and a bit louder, as the whole thing is a bit top-heavy, but the fact is that when you leave a Mountain Parade gig, you feel that the world is a slightly sweeter place than when you came in. They’re playing with We Aeronauts at the Sunday Roast later in the month. Though I pity the soundman, that’s going to be a hot ticket.