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A little email came my way from Cock and Bull TV guys with links to some Sam Amidon videos they took while he was in Ireland recently. Regular readers (all 5 of you- hello) will know I’m a HUGE Amidon fan, so it was cool to check them out. Cock and Bull did a lovely job of capturing Sam, especially in the quirky interview below; which includes what I reckon is the best description of touring ever….
I finally got to see him live as part of an AV show he’s been doing recently, and if I’m honest the show left me a little conflicted. I’m very used to Fringe style shows, so the oddness doesn’t bother me, but for me it didn’t work consistently across the set. The Guardian disagrees with me though, and I’m sure plenty of others do too.
There were times when the jarring changes he makes to the arrangements of his album tracks are arresting and interesting, and other times when it seems like he’s just bored with the songs and is out to sabotage them. It’s something Tommy Tiernan went through a phase of doing with his live stuff, but for different reasons, pushing the audience as far as he could to then win them back. The problem for a listener is that Amidon’s “straight” (and not at all boring) arrangements of the (largely) folk songs on his records (and a great R.Kelly cover for good measure) are haunting and interesting, yes, but beautiful and emotive. His voice and the musicians/instruments he chooses are delivered to stunning effect, and you couldn’t help feeling that he was bored with their sound, bored with playing them, and especially bored with singing them, so threw a grenade into the mix. Some of the visuals worked really well, and his sense of humour and odd persona works brilliantly at times, but the rest of the time it seems forced, and it was hard not to sigh in relief when he just got to the singing. I’ll be most interested to see what he comes up if/when he writes his own music though.
Here’s another Cock and Bull clip that hints at what I mean;
Another wonderful music video was released by Lisa Hannigan/Arbutus yarns this week for her “Little Bird” track from new album Passenger, the perfect complement to “Knots” which was released earlier this month.
They’re both such simple concepts, but then brilliantly executed on film (you can see the making of Knots here), and of course brilliantly filmed and edited by Myles O’Reilly and his Arbutus Yarns crew.
I had the privilege of working with Myles in the early stages of his film adventuring – he did beautiful films of a Sligo gig I did with Katie Kim and Valerie Francis, and a whole series of great work on Fresh Air that we did with Donal Dineen, so it’s just wonderful seeing Myles’ work get the opportunity to make inroads to a more global stage via Lisa’s audience, and to see him working more regularly in music video concepts (also see the lovely promo for Villagers -The Pact) outside of his wonderful live work.
I was at Donal Dineen’s Ode to Radio for Culture Night on Friday and guest Angkorwat mentioned an Arthur Russell night that’s coming up in Dublin in late October. A bit of googling has turned up an event page on Bodytonic’s site that mentions a great line up with contributions from Tim Lawrence, Jim Carroll, David Kitt, TR-One, Angkorwat (obv), Patrick Kelleher, School Tour, Hulk and more, on Sun 30th October. Looks like there’ll be a screening of the Wild Combination documentary, though there’s no stage times etc as yet. Arthur Russell was such a wonderful, diverse, exciting musicians that it looks like a great night- one for the diary for sure.
And any excuse to post my favourite Arthur Russell track is a good one. He’s one of my favourite discoveries of the last six or seven years, made courtesy of Dineen, who in turn was put on to him by David Kitt, who’s playing on the 30th – nice.
