Trick or treat?
The announcer manages to get off stage alive. Dave Pegg and his amiable fellow Fairport Convention compatriot, Simon Nicol, steady themselves for the off. PJ Wright's tall frame is cramped behind a pedal steel. Steve Gibbons fittingly dressed, like Dylan in a long Methodist preacher's coat moves towards the microphone. His face is almost as white as his hair. Fit for a part in Nosferatu. His long bony hands cradle an electric guitar. He shapes a chord with his left while lazily stroking the strings with the back of his long right hand.
A song, circa Dylan Blonde on Blonde, cuts across the well attended Brook like a razorblade. It's not a Dylan song but it could be. Right in his style, right down to Gibbons uncanny knack of delivering what Dylan sounded like at the time. I think the song is called Colours To The Mast. It is, as Gibbons will explain between songs, his tribute to Dylan.
There is a subtle difference between the Dylan Project and the tide of tribute bands cropping up everywhere. That is, these are artists in their own right and not bedroom confined, guitar playing, wannabe's. What Gibbons, Wright, Pegg and Nicol deliver is in a sense a musical history lesson. Get your music history from real sources rather than Paul Gambaccini. Trade a beer for the sofa. Capture some of the raw, magic energy that made Dylan the icon of his generation.
The first set is chock full of that classic electric Dylan, circa 1965/66. Simon Nicol recalls that Blonde on Blonde is his favourite double album. The band includes Absolutely Sweet Marie and Fourth Time Around. The songs tonight ably convey Dylan at his creative peak. What brings this image is Steve Gibbons. His pasty features, his grey lined face, this guy has had a hard paper round but he sings right there, as good as any I've heard do Dylanesque stuff.
Dave Pegg, as ever, is one of the most fluent and underated bassists around. He also played mandolin on one song. Nicol's amped acoustic shores up the rhythm behind the lazy strokes from Gibbons electric. PJ Wright does an effective job, better on steel than when he applies his Birmingham rock roots to the electric guitar playing to these ears. Nope it's a mile from Robbie Robertson. All that big stadium rock that was personified by the Steve Gibbons band of the 70s tends to leave me cold. That aside the punters, and they are the important arbiters, loved it.
I particularly enjoyed a couple of songs. Firstly, the bands humerous introduction to Peggy Day from Nashville Skyline. Gibbons said Dylan had virtually destroyed Tin Pan Alley in the sixties then had gone and written a beautiful Tin Pan Alley song himself in 1969. Nicol grimaced at the very words Nashville Skyline. Peggy Day certainly lightened the dark side of Gibbons haunted vocals.
The other song was a rollicking version of Sweetheart Like You. I've never heard the Dylan version, couldn't even tell you where it comes from, not being the most avid Dylan collector on the planet. I guess this is how Dylan would have sung it. I rock my boots along with the rest of them. Jimmy LaFave's version, however, with that corking Rick Poss solo unleashed midway through, has got to be THE definitive cut of that song. For me, anyway.
Dylan, for me, is the Shakespeare of his generation. He created an almost unmatchable body of work, great songs, songs which are going to run and run. The Dylan Project draw from the raw grit that made Dylan such a legend. They do it because the skinny, ghostly figure of the guy in the long coat sings Blonde on Blonde Dylan bordering on the macabre. Chilling. It was Halloween after all.
Last year Bob Pearce was in Austin, Texas cutting a CD, making contacts and generally making whoopee, I should think. The Talking Heads is once again for Saturday night. A modest £2.50 gets you in tonight.
Last time I saw Bob Pearce was up at the University when he and Top Topham (of the Yardbirds) made music to stand the hairs of the neck stand bolt upright. That was a good few years ago now. Every time I've seen Bob Pearce it has never been with the same band. He can, and does, play with all kinds of lineups.
The close shaved head look of that Topham gig has been replaced by a look that fits Halloween as perfectly as Steve Gibbons had done earlier. Bob Pearce resplendant in a long black suit coat, goatee beard, his hair now down on his collar, combed back like a cross between a fifties rocker and Count Dracula.
I savour some of the second and final set. Kicking, dirty, piston rod, lounge blues. Great drummer, bass and lead guitar and the man up front laying it down like some preacher delivering an acorn gospel. The crowd lapping it up.
The Talking Heads on a Saturday night is such a bizarre collection of characters that the lack of fancy dress for Halloween is hardly noticed (at one o'clock an elderly lady is laid on her back, legs in the air doing the can can on the Talking Heads big table). Only the two barmaids have dripped fake blood off their red lips and one is wearing something that should be a pair of Devil's horns but has ended up looking like they belong to a Jersey cow.
Dark Dylan, Chicago blues and the can can. All in one night. Solid.
Mike Plumbley