Well the internet is so wonderful and efficient these days, you can't look up last night's gig (well now it was Monday 19th's gig) to find out the name of the support band! A brief search for 'Kathryn Williams support band' found the culprits: Clayhill. I suppose I should have known I was in for a night of unabashed whimsy, given the nature of Kathryn's (you don't mind if I call her Kathryn do you? Thanks) own work. But it was an unnatural venue for it. A mesmerised (stunned, lethargic, bored?) audience, sat and stood in (I thought / hoped) shocked silence while Clayhill played their songs and laughed nervously at the band's bad jokes. Having said that, the audience was enthusiastic in its applause, so maybe they did actually like it. You can download music from their evil popup web site and make up your own minds.
Beware of Grasscutter, a song the bass player introduced by saying he found a man cutting an immaculate lawn in the mountains of Peru with a pair of scissors. '...So being a musician', he said, 'I got out my minidisk recorder and recorded it'. Why? We hoped we were in for some experimental Sound of Scissors as drum track, but the recording never appeared. I don't know why he mentioned it. It wasn't even imitated by the guitar part. I was also wondering if perhaps the guy had stood up and said 'look, I don't mind you recording, but I could do with a hand here, my shears are broke and the mower packed in and it isn't easy cutting a lawn with scissors you know.'
...So back to the point. I didn't think much of the support band really, not my thing. Kathryn Williams on the other hand was great, her voice was lovely, her current album is an album of covers, but she also claims to have an album's worth of new material, some of which she played. As she joked about messing up at a couple of points, I made a mental note to always cock something up when performing coz it really helps your audience to warm to you! Well as long as it's nothing major anyway.
We were treated to her interpretations of songs by the BeeGees (I Started A Joke - no disco unfortunately), Velvet Underground ('so I was sitting in the café eating egg and chips and I asked Lou Reed if I could sing one of his songs and he said yes' Candy Says), Mae West (A Guy What Takes His Time) and a surprisingly good version of Pavement's Spit on a Stranger. The Mae West tune suffered a little from being clunky and as my friend put it, 'like they've learned a jazz / blues song note by note', which kind of defeats the whole object of the genre. Ivor Cutler's Beautiful Cosmos sounded like they were taking the p*ss, a bit too twee, and everyone jumped out of their skins (or was it just me?) when she blasted out the final Halleluyah's of the famous, much covered song by Leonard Cohen. The sudden loudness must have woken up the soundman who obviously had everything set up for whimsy and wasn't ready for that kind of volume! No 'All Apologies', perhaps its poor reception in album reviews has dampened her love of that particular song.
If Kathryn Williams had fallen out of love with music - her reason / excuse for doing a covers album - it certainly seemed as if she was right back in there again. It was mainly the industry she was disillusioned with I think, that's been a battle for her since the beginning. So…er 8/10 for the gig, plus an extra 2/10 for making me laugh a lot!Her (not 3vil) web site is www.kathrynwilliams.net and you can download her latest single from there for 99p (£1.50 with printable art!)
