Beth Orton - Shepherds Bush Empire

Kim and I saw Beth Orton at The Shepherds Bush Empire last night. She was a her goofy charming self as usual (sample between song banter: “What’s ET short for?...... because he’s got lil legs”.

A Much bigger band that I’d seen her playing with before (I guess due to air fare costs – most Australian tours were either solo or very stripped back). Interestingly she had Leroy Bach from Wilco playing in her touring band – but I didn’t recognise many of the other players.

The show was good – the band seemed like they had only learnt the new album – so they played pretty much all of that – and she did a few acoustic sections where she took requests and played hits like ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘Sweetest Decline’. The best thing was Ted Barnes (guitarist / co-songwriter for some of the early records) had his new band Cahill play support – but then he did a couple of songs with her during the main set as a duo. They did ‘Feel To Believe’ which was probably the highlight for me.

Ryan Adams – Victoria Apollo Theatre

I’ve only seen Ryan Adams play a couple of times before – both of the Gold tour with The Pinkhearts/LAX – so I’m not familiar with the hit-and-miss reputation he’s gained for himself in the UK.

As I understand it – he cancelled a few shows and an entire tour in the UK, plus he had that whole tripping into the orchestra pit thing that stopped a show half-way through.

To make matters worse – Ryan has come under a lot fire, particularly in online blogs and discussion boards, around how much the amount of talking he does onstage outweighs the amount of playing.

All of this adds up to a feeling that you’re almost going to see someone with schizophrenia or some form of dementia – will it be the “good” Ryan or the “bad” Ryan. To put it another way – it seems sometimes he’s hot, and sometimes he’s not.

Well tonight at the impressive Apollo Victoria Theatre – he was clearly hot.

Kicking things off with a new song – which I think might be called ‘Don’t Get Sentimental On Me’ the show was great. Yup Ryan did a bit of muttering and went to great pains to single out web-based gossipers for ridicule. Yup he false started a few songs and seemingly moved from one song to another at random – in the process rendering possibly his best known song ‘New York, New York’ as a mid-song interlude during a lengthy rendition of ‘Cold Roses’.

But he was played some brilliant solo material – half a dozen from his awesome debut “Heartbreaker” – including a riveting ‘My Winding Wheel’, a sombre ‘Call Me On Your Way Back Home’ and a swampy rock reading of ‘Shakedown on 9th Street’, not too mention a show closing ‘Come Pick Me Up’ featuring somewhat unnecessary guest vocals from Carina Round - but still brilliant.

We also got a bunch of material from Ryan’s trilogy of 2005 releases – highlights for me where ‘Elizabeth You Were Born to Play That Part’ from “29”; ‘The Hardest Part’ from “Jacksonville City Nights” and ‘Let It Ride’, a medley of ‘Magnolia Mountain’ and ‘Beautiful Sorta’ from “Cold Roses”. The latter few featuring guest appearances from Cardinals Neal Casal on guitar and Brad Pemberton on snare drum and brushes.

And to prove that three albums in a year is still not enough to control his productivity – Ryan previewed four new songs – ‘Don’t Get Sentimental On Me’, ‘Two’ and my favourites the slow piano based ‘Everything Dies’, and ‘Lighthouses’.

He also found time to slip in a cover of The Grateful Deads ‘Stella Blue’.