To be honest, I approached this, Josh T Pearson's first solo gig in the UK since the recording of his solo album, with some trepidation. The album's been getting rave reviews from the critics, but it's a daunting listen: unremittingly bleak and sparse, seven songs in over an hour, five of them over ten minutes. I foresaw a long evening ahead.
But first (after arriving at the impossible-to-find Slaughtered Lamb) was Jack Cheshire, who played at our very own UCL Union for a Folkulture night back in the sepia-tinged days of 2007 or 2008. I remembered him being pretty good, and that's exactly what he was again this time. Solid folk-inflected singer-songwritery stuff, but without any real substance or anything of particular interest. The kind of thing that you can literally find on any street corner from a busker in a stupid wooly hat, although since I last saw him he has released an album, so presumably some people must like him a lot. Anyway, after a few songs I started looking around at the audience who'd packed the basement of the pub instead, which was quite interesting in itself.
Here's the elephant in the room: Josh T Pearson was the founder, guitarist and songwriter of Texas band Lift to Experience, who released one of the most critically acclaimed records of the 2000s in "The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads", and one of my personal favourites. Lift to Experience's only album, it alternates between reflective, minimalist guitar and almost spoken word narrative and some of the loudest, most intense firestorm guitar playing I've ever heard, tied together by the concept of an utterly bizarre apocalyptic narrative in which Texas becomes the Promised Land. But Pearson abandoned the project in about 2002 and hasn't played any of their songs since. What were we going to be in for tonight?
To his credit, Josh Pearson didn't shy away from his past history, perhaps recognising that nearly all of the crowd were there because of his previous band. Instead, although he never named them, his "old, noisy rock band" felt like a constant presence, with Pearson more than once apologising for coming back "ten years too late, and with a country record". Because for certain what we got wasn't anything like Lift to Experience in their feedback-laced peak, although it did perhaps share some of their religious fervour.
Josh Pearson shuffled onto the "stage" (actually just a corner of the room) in all black and with a very unkempt and long beard, looking like nothing so much as an Old West fire-and-brimstone preacher. There's definitely a certain mythology surrounding him personally, especially given his semi-dissappearance and refusal to tour since the breakup of LtE, and that's part of the persona which he exudes when he gets onstage. And though the songs he played fit that persona, his onstage banter really didn't. This was a very strange gig.
I'd estimate he spent maybe half of his onstage time actually playing songs, beautiful and hushed and spiritual. Although the new album's full of epics, he only played a couple of them, and the ones he did play he heavily edited, cutting out at least a couple of verses. "Sweetheart I Ain't Your Christ", plaintive on record, became a pointed personal rebuke, full of religious preaching as well as regret, bringing the crowd to a truly awestruck silence. He followed that by introducing a Boney M cover ("Rivers of Bablyon").
The other half of the set consisted of Josh telling some truly terrible jokes (he's a genuinely funny guy, although I'm not sure how much of that is because of the incongruity with his appearance and songs), and then having a ten-minute conversation with someone in the audience about the evils of the fur trade. He seemed to know the guy pretty well, and they've had this conversation before. "I watched the videos you gave me," he claimed, "they just made me hungry". A Texas boy through and through.
Disappointingly, it was a really short set, but he still played my favourite from the new album, "Country Dumb", as well as a couple of the songs which he used to play a few years ago, now seemingly abandoned. Less pure country folk than his newest stuff, but with the same intensity that's really his strength, "The Devil's on the Run", complete with mass crowd vocals, was a fitting end to a good (if slightly odd) set. Hopefully it won't be ten years before the next album.
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