Pickin’ & Grinnin’ Deadstring Brothers…
Pickin’ & Grinnin’
Deadstring Brothers
The Musician Pub, Leicester
February 5
If Carlsberg made bar bands they would have made the Deadstring Brothers!
They genuinely are the bar band of your dreams; think of the Stones around Exile on Main Street but without Sir Mick and actually fronted by Tom Jones and Tina Turner and you’ll only get some of the way to how good these guys are live.
Let me explain: In a half full Musician pub they hit the ground running with a powerful Ain’t No Hiding Love from their brand new album Silver Mountain then without letting anyone catch their breath singer and gang leader Kurt Marschke launched straight into 2003’s For A Time which was much louder and rockier than the original.
Guitars were soon being changed and Masha Marjeih took the lead on a stunning Toe The Line and Tennessee Sure Enough. For a pretty young thing she sure can belt out a mighty fine tune.
After half an hour the bar really was rocking….with the band not giving a monkeys chuff that they were playing to less than 70 people! Kurt was strutting his stuff like a man born to be on the stage and Masha was knocking Hell out of her maraca and tambourine while the two of them alternated lead vocals and harmonised like Angels for the next hour or so.
But the Deadstrings aren’t just about the singers…no sirree! The drums and bass were as a tight as the Arsenal defence and Spencer Cullum (the lost member of the Ramones) played some of the sweetest pedal steel that I’ve ever heard in all my life. Not content with that; he also managed some bottleneck that made the hairs on the back of my head stand on end. Then…then there was the Cat in the Hat on keyboards. Pat Kenneally (for it was he) alternated between old fashioned down home honky-tonk piano and some swirling atmospheric Hammond Organ on their version of the Band’s The Shape I’m In.
In my book the mark of a great band is when you hear a song for the first time and it sounds like you’ve known it all of your life and that happened at least three times tonight; Sacred Heart, Tennessee Sure Enough and You Look Like The Devil all had the crowd singing and dancing…badly!
With absolutely no disrespect to the Musician Pub, the Deadstring Brothers are far too good for a small venue like this – they need to get a good support slot on an Arena tour immediately and then straight back out into the Academies and Colleges across the UK. If they can get a small crowd of middle-aged men and women singing and dancing like they managed to do tonight; they will blow the socks off the youth of our nation if we can only get the band in front of them.
I know we’re currently debating in these esteemed pages what exactly to call Americana/Alt-Country/Roots music etc. etc…but the Deadstring Brothers proved that there are only two types of music that really matter – Good music and Bad music.
Tonight they were bloody good! Wow! They really did live up to the marketing hype – they have the swagger of the Faces, the Rock of the Stones and the Roll of the Band all mixed into a band of 20 something’s who couldn’t possibly have seen any of those bands in their pomp or prime. Perhaps their parents just had very cool record collections. Alan Harrison