NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
TIM WILLIAMS with Jim
Condie
Purest Blues were at King's Head
Hello, HELLO! Calling all real blues fans! You missed a great gig!
There were only half as many in the audience, last Friday night at the King's Head in Allendale, as there should have been, and this time it wasn't the promoter's fault.
Henry Ayrton's Northern Blues radio programme showcased a track from Tim Williams' Indigo Incidents CD -- that brought people in from Newcastle. Channel Four's Gig Guide on Teletext had the show listed for a week. The posters were out at all local outlets, and the ad ran in the Hexham Courant for the past three weeks. The regular quarterly newsletter hit the postboxes on Wednesday, and if you cared about the blues, you had ample notice of a good blues gig.
How many other live blues were there in the area over the past fortnight, then? 'Well it's a lover's question, I'd like to know.' Think about it -- the music, perhaps the best friend you'll ever have, will certainly die if you let it.
Local promotions group Northumbrian Music Nights are learning a thing or two about the blues, anyway, and perhaps all experience is only good grist for the mill.
But if they have to be ground down, they'd be happy to expire in the knowledge that they promoted the sort of quality music that Tim Williams with Jim Condie put on for their show. This was succinct, superlative, deep and sincere acoustic blues.
Two guys with guitars, and that included the requisite National, the slide, sometimes a mandolin (to bring out the feeling of the old black string bands like the Mississippi Sheikhs). And the reedy voice, with purest inflections of adulterated sorrow, as yet another whiskey river runs alongside the big muddy. Two guys with guitars, and yet as the twangs tugged on heart strings, amongst the real afficionadoes in the audience, it seemed that a veritable orchestra of pain and suffering took life, took on our blues, and spirited them far far away to a distant place, unlike Kansas City, where no more troubles, Lord, can ever hurt us, and where waking up the next morning is only a simple pleasure.
The audience knew what they were listening to, and as the desperately aching harmonics rolled out, as the songs tumbled along between tunings and intermingled with reflective anecdotes about life, music and how it is played and lived, the mood mellowed, widened and enlarged, so that the intimate room became lost, for a moment, in an all-sustaining sea of blues chords.
Cue the banjo for a light-hearted moment. Add in a number from the Pentecostal hymnal. Call for selections from Scrapper Blackwell, from Blind Willy McTell, finish with 'I can't be satisfied' as Muddy Waters famously extracted time and time again. Mix them all together, 'When the sun goes down', on a little 'Riverboat Rendezvous', and you've got classic delta blues. And Jim Condie, perhaps the best accompanist a bluesman could hope to have, got the biggest ovation of the night for his incredible riffs on 'Vigilante Man'.
But if you missed it, you missed it, what more can one say?
