Right this is brilliant. If you don't know this guy just take a few minutes to travel through the contemporary horror of market-town england with him...
Not surprisingly this is up for Best Original Song at the 2014 Radio 2 Folk Awards. I have wanted to write about Chris for a while now but couldn't get a handle on why. Now I know - the folk ghetto, whilst well-meaning, have got to let him go. Release him for the rest of the world to hear. He's one of the great singer-songwriters, up there with the Bobs, Neils, Crosbys and Jonis. Check this out (and notice how his whole body gets involved)...
"If we've done our best, we'll be ready for the rest, we'll just close our eyes and let go."
Part of my smalltown notoriety stems from my having missed every gig he has played for well over a decade now! He played The West End Centre in Aldershot on Valentines Night and I missed him again, BUT I was at his soundcheck this time and it's that, that I want to address, because it was astonishing. He's found a place. A new place. For the music to go. Or rather - where he can take it, or where it can take him. And I got to witness him trying to go there! On his own, in an empty hall. I don't know how much of this is conscious or not but he played and played and much was discussed between songs (Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, pocket knives, Dave Grohl and that Soundboard, The Pretty Things, Wittgenstein, Blue Oyster Cult, William Blake, and lots and lots of musings about music) and all the time he was searching for something. He played and struggled. The music is incredible by the way, but that's because he's a master craftsman, it's a given. But what he was trying to do was use those skills and musings to get to that new area. And he did, twice. It's the sort of place ecstatic jazz approaches, but it's not jazz, and it's not folk. It's not American - it is very very english. But he wasn't content with that. He said something like "I can't find the magic"...so on he went, on stage, off stage, back stage. Thinking, playing, discussing. And then the third time was the one for me, he played Jerusalem! I'll post a version but it is warm. The one he played was deathly cold. A very tired man, in an empty hall, in a very tired and rundown place...nailed all of that in a beautiful mausoleum made out of sound. I'm not convinced he even noticed. Then I had to leave
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