Kathleen Edwards was one of the highlights of this year's South By Southwest Festival in Austin. Surely, I thought, she couldn't sound as good on a dull Wednesday night in a dingy London basement. But she could and she did.
The buzz created by her debut, Failer, attracted some top London record company bosses to her first ever UK date. Among those were alt. country specialists Loose—although if they have designs on her, they must have been dismayed by the competition, which included Warner's chief, John Reed.
And he surely could not have failed to be impressed.
Sparks
ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON
FRIDAY MARCH 21, 2003
If geeks had their own political party, they'd probably be able to organise their conferences around the same time and place as the next Sparks gig, thus ensuring a 100 per cent attendance. That's how London's Festival Hall feels tonight, anyway. Sparks fans make your average Trekkie look like Elvis—that's young Elvis, of course: although even old, fat, shit Elvis wouldn't look so bad beside a myopic thirty something in a lurid "Lights Out Ibiza" T-shirt.
What it means to be in a rock band, or have a career, seems to have melted and fused into something older and freer for Jon Langford. The Welsh leader of original Leeds punks The Mekons lives in Chicago these days, and plays with The Waco Brothers, The Sadies and The Pine Valley Cosmonauts too.
One of the oddest gigs I've seen in a long time. The weathered Leven sings mournful songs of loss and regret in a rich, soulful voice. He's a big poetry man, quoting Pablo Neruda on his new album Shining Brother Shining Sister. Yet, more often than he's being a melancholic, working-class minstrel, he's being a man of the people in an entirely different manner. For at least half his time onstage, he tells bawdy shaggy dog stories.
