Pickin’ & Grinnin’

Advanced ticket sales alerted organisers of the Cabbage Patch folk club to the fact that their usual venue would be too small to seat the expected audience for a rare UK performance from one of America’s finest living writers and performers—Richard Shindell. Fortunately the Twickenham pub boasts two gig spaces and for the first time in many years the upstairs area was used. A capacity house of 150 (twice the size of a decent crowd in the smaller room) poured in to watch and hear a relaxed, virtuoso performance from this current Argentinean resident—a contemporary songwriting maestro.

Prior to Shindell’s performance, the Patch welcomed back Jack Harris, the young Welsh artist, who performed songs from his BROKEN YELLOW album with great skill and sensitivity. Particularly fine was his rendition of the album’s opening track Oast Houses, a self-penned song, whose poetic lyrics are worthy of A.E. Houseman and melody and performance the standard of Nick Drake. Jack has come a long way since he supported AJ Roach at this venue three years ago.

You Stay Here, one of his best known songs, kicked off Richard Shindell’s 16 song set on the last night of his short UK tour. Nobody dreamed of doing anything else for the next two hours. Shindell followed this with Nora, a dreamy, wistful ballad invoking Heloise and Abelard while detailing the moods of an eternal love triangle with sharp but delicate humour: ‘Your husband has accepted the parish in Greenland. I met him drowning his vows at the bar’.

Richard Shindell’s raconteur skill showed itself as he acquainted his audience with Mischief Night, a New Jersey term for the night before Halloween when teenagers hit the town and unsuspecting residents with eggs by the dozen. No option for trick or treat on this evening just a barrage of white and yolk. With this as background, Richard described how he wrote a bitter anti-love song with wicked humour and presented it to his then partner in the ‘first blush of romance’—not designed to go down too well! Are You Happy Now? is a jaunty, nasty song that burbles along with great merriment. Comparisons with Michael Stipe singing and song-style are nowhere more in evidence than in this wicked pastiche.

A Summer Wind, A Cotton Dress, wryly introduced by Shindell as ‘another twisted love song’, is a wistful review of an unattainable past, characterised by such understated lines ‘The kids are fine. They’re six and nine. I think you’d probably like my wife, but the kitchen light seems much too bright for what I find myself thinking tonight’. This was swiftly followed by an old folk/roots standard, Texas Rangers, frequently sung a cappella, although the version on Shindell’s current album SOUTH OF DELIA features Richard Thompson providing skilled guitar accompaniment. Shindell chose to pick up his mandolin tonight as he launched into a lively version of the narrative number.

Richard Shindell alluded to the 9/11 tragedy as the period when he wrote his next two songs, although he emphasised that neither give direct reference to this event as some post-9/11 songs can lean towards mawkishness or over-sentimentality. Last Fare Of The Day is a slowish reflective tune, set in his former hometown of New York City and narrated by a cab driver during unseasonable periods of winter rain and spring drought. Its companion piece, State Of The Union looks at the world through the eyes of a heroin addict, gradually getting his act together and relates this to a presidential address (or speech by our ‘current occupant’—Shindell’s preferred term of choice!).

Another anecdote about a recent UK encounter with one of his most admired musicians led into a spirited ragtime, jugband-style version of Roy Bookbinder’s I Got Mine. ‘I’m making sure he gets credit for his song tonight as he found out from me that I didn’t the last time I played his song’, Richard admitted to his amused audience. A much admired song from SOMWHERE NEAR PATERSON followed next. Transit explores nightmare traffic journeys along New Jersey highways. It builds into a majestic long and winding road of a song, populated by a universe of motley East Coast road users. I suggested to Shindell as he came off stage at the break that he should write a sequel for Londoners about the M25!

After the 20 minute interval, Richard kept the driving motif, getting into trucking gear with The Kenworth Of My Dreams, from his 1992 album SPARROW’S POINT. He then introduced a song he wrote for Joan Baez, with whom he had toured the UK previously. Reunion Hill is a Civil War song (that suits that great lady as well as Robbie Robertson’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down) which documents the painstaking search of soldier’s wife for her lost spouse as she walks towards the battered, weary and wounded militia on their way home from war: ‘I cleaned the brow of many a soldier, dousing for my husband’s face’.

Fenario was prefaced by Shindell as having kinship to the folk rhythms of songs such as Peggy-O but with a final verse based on a metaphysical poem by John Donne. It’s a love ballad portraying a lover who prays that dawn won’t break so her man can stay longer by her side. Shindell’s playing of this had overtones of Bert Jansch—with its soft and sophisticated subtleties. Canción Sencilla (translated as Simple Song) is Shindell’s only self-penned Spanish song, written for his Argentinean wife. It also humorously tackles the difficulties of Spanish grammar as Shindell writes about reflexive pronouns, the subjunctive and verb conjugation. Shindell sang this delightfully clever little song sounding uncannily like current indie-acoustic favourite Jose Gonzalez.

Retaining the Argentinean theme for Balloon Man, Shindell spotlighted a wonderful eccentric from the Buenos Aires’ plazas who features in a love letter where the narrator describes a balloon seller with an arc of balloons all round him—‘a little bit ragged and his glasses slightly askew’, while also sadly reflecting ‘you’re so far away on the other side of the world’. Shindell’s second tribute to a fellow writer came with his version of Bob Dylan’s Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power) which matched the relentlessness of the Street Legal original. Richard set the scene for his next song, describing the Cape Cod beaches of Massachusetts, (near where Marconi first started his wireless transmissions) where sandcastles are built by children to keep the sea at bay.

He played There Goes Mavis with a Gilberto/Jobim bossa nove rhythm, as the storyline follows the freeing of a caged bird out to sea by a small girl, against her mother’s advice. The bird continues to fly … right out of the end of the song.

The Cabbage Patch audience were spellbound from start to finish, captivated by Richard Shindell’s artistry, chemistry and the beauty of his songs. They were on their feet as the special guest encored with the classic anti-war song Waist Deep In The Big Muddy. Richard introduced it as ‘a Pete Seeger song with my version a little closer to Dick Gaughan’s’. Tonight Richard Shindell, as with all his musical performances, injected his own unique skills, style and warmth into songs that will last a lifetime and beyond. The majority of these flow from his own pen. SB

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 4:22 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.