Brookes University’s cavernous venue is potentially not the ideal place to enjoy Stornoway’s wonderfully intimate, Anglocentric but Irish-sounding folk-pop. As a building, it is the epitome of modernist hideousness, confirming that the Prince of Wales may be mad, but on Sixties architecture at any rate he’s right.
Before we could hear how Brian Briggs and his merry men coped with the challenge of transmitting their ancient-but-somehow-right-now living room music into that vast space we had two support acts to enjoy or negotiate according to case. Sweet-natured pop duo Foxes! are a minor Oxford treasure long since relocated to Brighton, and their unpretentious boy-girl tunesmithery was well received, though I found it on the generic side. Quite why Race Horses were on the bill is anyone’s guess, a four piece from Wales who seemed to be on a trawl through the tiredest of Fifties tropes, whether it be Buddy Holly bubblegum or the ur-Rock of Eddie Cochrane. Comments from nearby scenesters ran the gamut from ‘What do you think of this deeply forgettable band?’ through to ‘Wouldn’t it be great if they stopped playing?’
When they did, their place was taken by a solo violin player who created a brief but arresting loop-assisted prelude before launching into the wintry intro to ‘The Coldharbour Road’, one of my favorites from ‘Beachcomber’s Windowsill’. It was immediately obvious that Briggs was in superb voice- even on record his low notes can occasionally sound a little bit gruff, but on this misty, evocative tune and for the rest of the set he sang exquisitely. There was plenty to savor instrumentally too: Brian’s guitar playing is masterful, Jon Ouin is a splendidly versatile performer, equally at home on piano, banjo or pretty much anything else the song needs, and Ollie Steadman alternates seamlessly between electric and standup bass. The mix took a little while to warm up, but the band, learning all the time how to cope with the bigger and bigger venues they are inevitably playing, filled the room without ever resorting to bombast or the volume pedal. Quite the opposite, as we shall see.
The set reminded us constantly of the unwavering excellence of the album: hit after hit kept coming, with ‘I Saw You Blink’ a jaunty, singalong standout. The wife-elect accuses me of having an anachronistic Fifties-style stiff upper lip response to emotional stimulus (meaning I don’t cry when someone gets whacked in Spooks), but I always get a bit wobbly on the stoic yet heart-rending tale of wasted lives and confinement that is ‘Fuel Up’, tonight beautifully rendered. And I forgot that ‘Watching Birds’ is a rather great rock and roll song, replete with playful lyrics, end-of-the-pier organ arpeggios and kazoo solo (upgraded tonight to a trumpet break, a signal improvement). The deviations from the record yielded mixed results- ‘November Song’ is a gorgeous solo for Briggs suggesting that the sophomore album may not be the struggle it is for most artists, while letting a bloke from The Keyboard Choir onstage resulted only in perplexity, with ‘Goodnight’ smothered in off-key synthesizer bongs. The set ended with Stornoway’s characteristic mixture of modesty and audacity, ‘The End of the Movie’ being played sans amplifiers, a filled room of more than a thousand capacity reduced to silent adulaton. Truly, quiet is the new loud.