No one started off wanting to be folk or reinvent folk music. Or writing folk music. Or commenting on folk music. We are not purists. This folk movement, or wyrd folk movement, is just a term that has been made up by journalists - it means nothing - like the term electroclash. The thing is - folk purists do come to my shows. They hate it. And it’s not like ‘I don’t like the sound of his voice, it doesn’t agree with me’, that’s something I can deal with, no, the folk purists hate it. They go and drop evil poison eggs on the show. They are almost schizophrenic in their devotion to Nick Drake or whoever. So they read about me, they think they are going to see a folk show and are shocked because I’m not folk. The thing is we never said that we are folk. We just call it The Family, because, that is what it is. A Family. I’ve known Coco Rosie for 13 years, Joanna for 8 years, Jackie O Motherfucker for five years, we have our friendship and then the music.
Via Antony and Entrance, and a lot of new listening over the summer, I finally caught my first DB gig at the Astoria, last Wednesday. (One of my sons heard him a few days ago in Paris, in a joint gig with Antony — am I jealous? And the night of the Astoria gig, my other son texted me from Manchester where he had got himself into Bob Dylan's concert [about which Philip has just blogged]. Nice to feel the family's into its music.) My friend Joe, who has heard Devendra a few times, was surprised at the choice of venue and I agree: it's a rock-and-roll den and quite large, and the quieter, solo songs were lost in the large space — not least because where we were, at the top, near the bar at the back, people talked through the songs and one guy even took and made mobile phone calls. We had met up with Gabby and her amazement, as a singer/songwriter, was more than enough professional support to make me feel I wasn't eccentric in finding this behaviour … annoying. (In any case, why pay nearly £20 for a gig and then carry on like this?)
What's more, the Astoria is not a friendly place. It's part of the Mean Fiddler group and one of the staff said to me during the evening, 'Believe me, they are mean': my camera was impounded as I entered the building ('this is professional gear' — rubbish) and on top of the cloakroom fee they tried to charge me again when I wanted to get something from my coat during the gig. Officious, over-priced (the drinks!), pleasant one-to-one but not good as an outfit, the Astoria's crowning shame was quite astonishing: I have never seen a gig before where a huge stage-hand arrives during the band's final number, stands on stage right alongside them and looms threateningly until they wind up and leave.
So it's a great relief that the music was outstanding. We arrived too late for the Akron Family (who impressed Gabby greatly), but we caught the Dirty Three who are well worth catching again — the jazz drummer was particularly impressive.
Devendra Banhart's voice and songs are ones that have won me over since I first came across them earlier this year. His recordings with Young God Records are here, you can read about the superb Cripple Crow here and it has its own website here. (There's a video of 'I Feel Just Like a Child' here; he wore most of his clothes the night we saw him. Link via The Listen.) Pitchfork's review of Cripple Crow is here and the Observer's here. Devendra Banhart's MySpace site has a full biographical appraisal of his music and development.
His current group (the Hairy Fairy band) has great style and presence. They began the set with the anti-war song, 'Heard Somebody Say' ('Heard somebody say the war ended today/ But everybody knows it's going still'). Of other numbers, ones that stand out include 'Quedate Luna', 'Dragonflies' (with Bianca Casady of Coco Rosie), 'Hey Mama Wolf', 'At The Hop' … I think we also had 'Luna De Margarita', but the evening came after a long day and keeping a clear memory of the set wasn't made any easier with the amount of distraction around us. With the encore came 'Little Boys' and 'I Feel Just Like a Child' and with this (and the lingering after-effect of the earlier 'Long Haired Child') the evening found its legs in that cavernous hall — the audience beginning to lift and move. At which point, the heavy-handed stage crew appeared.
Above all, four things strike me most about DB. He has tremendous range — in the influences he's absorbed and in the music he writes — and an immediately distinctive voice (that I've quickly grown to like a lot). And he is a wonderful performer, able to hold all your attention with his more meditative, quieter songs, amusing and entertaining in lighter, more whimsical ones, and ecstatic and commanding in louder, wilder numbers. To these three, the first two clear from listening to his albums and the third strongly apparent by the end of Wednesday night, a fourth: his creative energy and use of tradition — exhilarating and leavening — are characterised by an outgoing warmth and eccentricity, a love for extended artistic friendship well beyond the mainstream.
I haven't mentioned the break in proceedings when DB invited an unknown to step up and sing, solo, to the crowd. To judge from The Listen's account of a gig in LA in July, this must be a trademark — and entirely of a piece with his collaborative, familial approach to music-making. The unknown was pretty good and I will not forget the site of the band in the background, swaying along and lightly beating rhythm with drum sticks and beer bottles.
I'm off to hear Coco Rosie at The Scala next month. The Observer's first review of Cripple Crow looked at it alongside Coco Rosie's new album, Noah's Ark — in the context, then, of The Family, the network of creative friendships loosely centred around the ex-centric DB. It concludes:
Both the Casadys and Banhart had itinerant childhoods shaped by their parents' alternative lifestyles. Streetwise - and just plain wise - in the way that feral children can be, they have both made albums that, in distinct ways, celebrate the instinctive and unconstrained.
It's worth reading this Poptones interview with Coco Rosie and delving into the label they've founded, Voodoo Eros.
Another family member I'd love to hear live is (surprise, surprise) Vashti Bunyan; Gabby reckons men prefer her voice … I need to listen to her more before I can make up my mind about her. So I don't lose them: Pitchfork review of Lookaftering; Spinney Records handles her original album, Another Diamond Day, in the UK and this is reviewed by Pitchfork here; Guardian/Observer pieces about her; FatCat Lookaftering album release news — and FatCat news here of her collaboration with Animal Collective, Prospect Hummer. Devendra Banhart, in another Poptones interview (also quoted from at the top of this posting):
Vashti is the reason why I write songs. I told her I had this song that she had to sing on the album. And you know? Every night before I perform a show I write on my arm, ‘Happy Vashti’. Why? Because if the communal vibe is not on, I can still know why I’m doing this for. That Vashti is there. And when she said yes, I flipped out. I wandered around San Francisco for days trying to think of an appropriate song to write for her. And the song we did together - it's my favourite on the album.
Some last words from the excellent Pitchfork review of Cripple Crow:
… it feels more like the fruit of community interaction than the product of a lone singer/songwriter. The communal vibe is hinted at by the album's artwork: Rather than adorning the cover with his usual calligraphic scribbles, Banhart offers a composite photo of "The Family" (a term he often ascribes to his musical friends), gathered beneath a large knotty tree and accompanied by the disembodied heads of smiling spirits. Sgt. Pepper is the obvious point of departure, though unlike the Beatles' classic, there are no numbered silhouettes in the liner notes to decode the relative anonymity of the photo subjects. Fittingly, the only immediately recognizable figure is Banhart himself, crouching front and center, wings spread wide.
The artwork conjures Native America, an attribute Banhart seemingly alluded to in a recent email exchange, admitting that he's "a little terrified at how white most of the people are," but reassuring me that "68% of the people on the cover have Native American blood." Indeed, Banhart strives for ethnic diversity on Cripple Crow, boasting the highest concentration of Spanish-sung tracks of any of his albums (he was raised in Venezuela where Spanish was his mother tongue), and finding him moving further beyond "freak" territory and into a worldly blend of various exotic approaches. Banhart has always experimented with method and sound, but he's never before approached Cripple Crow's expertise and variety. In all its obvious details, the album not only finds Banhart coming into his own as a songwriter and performer, but suggests future directions for the 24-year-old as well.
