Tuesday 14 February 2012

support live music

We went last night to hear Ewan McLennan at the Colchester Arts Centre.  He is a young Scottish musician I first heard on Mike Harding’s Radio 2 folk programme about three years ago.  Mike Harding opined that he was very good, and although Mike Harding is a natural enthusiast with many swans and very few geese, I too was greatly taken with this new and unknown Scottish voice.  I looked him up after the next day, when R2 had finally posted programme details up, and found that he had a modest website but no record company deal yet.  Instead he was marketing his home produced CD himself, so I sent off for one, which he kindly sent back by return of post despite the fact that I’d spelt his name wrong on the cheque and had to send him another one.  You could tell it was a homemade CD because it took about eight times longer than normal to load to my iPod.

Two or three years on Ewan McLennan is on national tour.  Colchester last night, Carlisle this evening.  He has a record company deal, with the first CD out and the next one due soon.  In 2011 he won the R2 Horizon Award, and he has just played at a Martin Simpson gig.  He has had guitar lessons from Martin Simpson (presumably only once he was up to the folk equivalent of grade 8) and it shows, but in a good way.  He has a nice, light, husky voice, good for folk (meaning that in a good way too), and you can hear the words when he sings, even in the slightly muddy acoustics of the deconsecrated church that houses the Colchester Arts Centre.  He has a gentle, amusing line in stage chat, which he needs, having also studied in the Martin Simpson school of guitar tuning.  He sings a mixture of traditional and modern songs, has found good versions of the former, and mostly decent examples of the latter.  He is clearly anti-war, and his politics are to the left of centre, but he wears his convictions lightly and doesn’t ram them down the audience’s throats.  Folk musicians tend to be of the left, a bit like comedians.  His stage manner is still quite reserved to the point of shyness, but he comes across as a very genuine human being.

I’d bought the tickets in advance, although I knew it would be nowhere near a sell-out, to galvanise us into bothering to go on the night.  While I wasn’t expecting us both to be suffering from colds (we were), going out on a Monday night in February after three days at work can feel like an effort, and staying in by the fire seem a very attractive proposition.  But I thought I’d like it if I only made the effort to get there (I did) and having heard Ewan McLennan’s debut on R2 I wanted to see him live and support his fledgling career.  And I felt a certain moral obligation to go because I had asked the organiser of the Colchester folk club if she could book him, though she doesn’t know me and I shouldn’t think she did it for my benefit.  I think Ewan McLennan is poised to go far.  His guitar technique is already superb, and he has a real feeling for traditional music.  Given time and practice to develop his stage persona and confidence he looks like the natural heir to Martin Simpson (though I hope Martin Simpson will not be retiring for many years yet).  If and when he is headlining at the major folk festivals and picking up folk awards for best album or best traditional song, I shall get a little buzz that I bothered to go and hear him on a cold night in Colchester, when he was almost unknown.

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