Gillian Welch with David Rawlings, Hammersmith Apollo

The problem with gig blogging is that unless you do it loads – which to my shame I don’t – each individual post tends to be a laudatory, universally gleeful paean to the act and experience in question. It’s not that I haven’t been to the occasional duff gig – Springsteen in Hyde Park a couple of years ago was a bit of a let down, seeing Ocean Colour Scene twice in a row in the late nineties was a big mistake – it’s just that these days almost by definition if I’m bothering to see someone live I like them a lot.

And so, predictably, Gillian Welch and musical partner Dave Rawlings were wonderful, to my ears anyway. From high in the circle the visual aspect of the show was mildly disorientating: the pair made to look even tinier by being alone in the middle of the Apollo’s vast black stage, standing on a rectangle of cream rug with only mic stands and one or two instruments behind them (the same oriental rug, Gillian tells us, that they stood on for their appearance on Later Live… with Jools Holland the night before). David besuited underneath an impressive Stetson, Gillian all bare arms and legs, cowboy boots and hair.

The sound was remarkably full and expansive given it’s produced by just two voices and four sets of fingers, the digits alternating between guitar and banjo. Gillian’s soaring voice – at once deep and soulful, then reaching heights of sorrowful vulnerability – is perfectly matched by David’s close harmony accompaniment: the two vocals barely distinguishable at times but completely symbiotic.

The duo succeed in creating a genuine sense of intimacy in what is a reasonably soulless cave filled with a couple of thousand people, thanks both to the songs themselves and the patter inbetween – at one point when the banjo needs retuning Gillian gives up, hands it to Dave and says ‘we tune because we care… and because we have no drum kit to hide behind’.

Highlights are many: diving bass slides coupled with dancing top strings intermingling with the can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head melody of Elvis Presley Blues; marvellous mid-solo capo changing during Red Clay Halo (both from the excellent 2001 album Time (The Revelator)); the sad and beautiful Annabelle from debut Revival, featuring one of many virtuoso acoustic guitar solos from Rawlings, rightly drawing a round of applause from the audience.

Here’s the thing though: this was a lovely gig, but I couldn’t help but wondering – with the best will in the world – what it was that had drawn so many people to brave the cold November night. I struggle to believe there are other duos that could’ve put on such a rich and soulful set, full of passion and impressive musicianship. But with just two people playing what are (even with all their adornments) simple songs, the experience – whisper it – wasn’t that different from listening to a recording.

With a band – with more instruments, even – you get greater room for variation: even small departures in tone or timing accumulate to quite a different overall effect each time when multiplied across several players. So with apologies for ending on a mildly philosophical note, why did many hundred souls and I go? Was it because of the human drama of seeing two people accomplish tricky guitar and vocal parts? To enjoy a distinctive communal musical experience? Or simply to say we’ve seen someone who rarely tours (and to blog about it afterwards)?

Margins: A History of Christianity (781)

I’ve blogged before about my own personal atheism. I mention this by way of contextualising why I found the following quote from the 17th Century Dutch philosopher Spinoza very powerful: in short, because I think it applies to all kinds of dogmatic regime based on or around unthinking hero worship.

Organised religion has many times taken on this character, and in some places still does, but it need not. As Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in his constantly fascinating A History of Christianity, ‘doubt is fundamental to religion’; the Old Testament is chock full of it (usually punished by God’s wrath, but still). Anyhow, over to Spinoza and his godlike mind:

The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man.

You don’t need me to point out that the above applies to fascist and communist regimes as much as the Spanish Inquisition.

Margins: Q (357)

The novel Q by the fraternity of Italian anarchists known as the Wu Ming Foundation (writing here under the wonderfully meaningless nom de plume Luther Blissett – Luther was a journeyman footballer who briefly featured in the AC Milan squad of the 1980s) is, to my mind, as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, certainly clothed in front of a book.

Writing more than a decade ago, the authors were actively trying to make a political point (several, actually) by charting the bloody oppression of and internecine warfare between the various factions that made up Reformation-era Continental Europe. They go as far as to include in the novel’s appendix (mostly 16th Century woodcuttings depicting gruesome acts) an excerpt from a press release denouncing the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999.

Fortunately, Q is about as far away from a dry political treatise as one could wish: the narrative traces the rising and falling fortunes of an Anabaptist revolutionary, who amongst other things is witness to the terrible siege of Münster. On the tail of the revolutionaries is a Papist spy, whose attempts to infiltrate and undermine are told through the letters he writes to his master in Rome. The whole thing is chock-full of sex, violence, intrigue, religion, and lots and lots of mud.

That this novel about revolt and the attempts of those in power to oppress it is still relevant a decade on quickly becomes apparent in the early chapters. About two thirds of the way through, the 21st Century parallels become almost laughably clear. Our hero, battered and psychologically bruised following the horrors of Münster, has reached Antwerp and is having a revealing conversation about the way the world really works:

‘Now you know where to find the Antichrist you’ve spent your whole life fighting.’

‘In there?’ I point at the imposing building in front of us. [a bank]

‘No. In the purses that pass from hand to hand all around the world. You’ve fought against princes and property owners. I’m telling you that without money those people would be nothing, you’d have defeated them long ago. Instead, there’s always a banker hanging around to finance their initiatives.’

‘I can see how that applies to commercial enterprises, but what does a banker get out of financing a war against the peasants?’

‘Do you need to ask? So that they’ll go back and till the fields of their masters, dig in their mines. From that moment, the bankers will get a considerable share of everything produced.’

Voracious book buying

I enjoyed reading James Wood’s account in a recent edition of The New Yorker (not freely available online unfortunately) of clearing out his father-in-law’s library, after the older man died. I particularly liked Wood’s description of his father-in-law’s almost aggressively voracious approach to buying books, which made me wonder if I do this already myself, and if I do, whether that was a good thing.

…as he got older and busier, he acquired far more books than he could read [...]. The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

Margins: Infinite Jest (173)

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is very big and very, very clever, and so writing marginal notes rather than attempting anything so daunting as a ‘review’ is particularly appropriate.

The last sentence in the passage below is reasonably typical of the beautifully surreal images peppered throughout, this one more towards the subtle end of the Infinite Jest spectrum.

Here is how to carry a tennis ball around in your stick-hand, squeezing it over and over for long stretches of time – in class, on the phone, in lab, in front of the TP, a wet ball for the shower, ideally squeezing it at all times except during meals. See the Academy dining hall, where tennis balls sit beside every plate.