Steve Earle in the UK

I finally got to see “Steve Earle”:http://www.steveearle.com/ play live at the “Wychwood Festival”:http://www.wychwoodfestival.com/ outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.

Hanging out at world music festivals is usually not me at all, and I felt rather out of place among the various rainbow-hatted yoghurt-weaving types. One measure of how this particular subculture is cut off from the rest of the British population is that I passed a whole day among several thousand of them without seeing a single person wearing a replica football shirt (ten minutes in the local shopping mall would probably result in a count of 20!). Anyway I had a great time, and everyone seemed to be pretty nice.

A word about Ms Moorer’s set first. She was on at lunchtime and as woman-alone-strumming-guitar made her way through some not-very-exciting material. She also comes over as very shy indeed and didn’t communicate much with the audience at all. But she is possessed of a marvellously strong voice and when she played a traditional song, Carrickfergus, rather than one of her own and was accompanied by Steve Earle on mandolin, she was really rather good. (Not that I’m attributing any special properties to Mr Earle, just that the addition of the mandolin and the guitar lifted the whole thing).

Earle himself was on much later and, I have to say, lived fully up to my expectations. This was a solo acoustic set, although when I’d booked I’d thought he was playing with the Dukes. Maybe next time, but this was great anyway. He started, somewhat oddly I thought, with “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”, learnt, as he told us from a Bob Dylan record, and proceeded to tell an anecdote about how he lived across the street from Rick Von Schmidt (from whom Dylan got the song) in the 1970s. In this case, as in a few others through the set, anyone whose listened to Earle’s Air America Radio shows has probably heard the story. He then made his way,
over the next 1 hour 40 minutes through a variety of material (accompanied by guitar or mandolin plus harmonica) including Taneytown, Steve’s Last Ramble, Goodbye, Tom Ames Prayer, Dixieland, The Galway Girl, My Old Friend the Blues, Someday, The Mountain, Ellis Unit One, Comin’ Around (duet with AM), Townes Van Zandt’s Rex’s Blues, Fort Worth Blues, Rich Man’s War, Revolution Starts Now (finale to the set), Copperhead Road (encore). That’s roughly in the right order, I think, but there were also at least a couple of songs I didn’t recognize as well and I may have forgotten something. He got better and better as the set went on. The first few numbers including Taneytown and Goodbye were pretty ragged I thought, but after the first half hour or so everything was pretty under control and very powerfully expressed. He segued from Rex’s Blues to Fort Worth Blues as he does on Just an American Boy, and that worked particularly well as did the duet with Allison Moorer.

Thankfully, he kept the sermonizing to a minimum. He gave a bit of speech about the Civil War (mentioning the allegations of plagiarism against Stephen Ambrose in passing!), told us all that all wars are basically about money before Rich Man’s War, and spoke about the importance of trade unions before The Mountain. Some of it I found congenial, other bits rather crude and simplistic, but then I’m not looking to Steve Earle for political nuance! Definitely worth the price of admission and I think that anyone who can catch him in London or in Manchester or at Glastonbury during his trip to the UK won’t be disappointed.

(SE is the first guest on Ned Sherrin’s “Loose Ends” on BBC Radio 4 this week, “archived for a week”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio4/aod.shtml?radio4/looseends .)

(There was some other good stuff on that day as well, I should add. And I’d especially want to mention Finnish band “Varttina”:http://www.varttina.com/ who play an eclectic mix of folk, jazz and other styles that defy categorization, at least by me.)