Previews by Mike Davies

Wednesday January 5

Michelle Lawrence

Ideally you should try and catch the Birmingham soul singer at a gig where she’ll be focusing on her own material rather than having to play soul, r&b and pop favourites to a night club crowd primarily there for the drink, but since it’s free entry it’s a useful opportunity to discover what the fuss is going to be about when her debut album, I’m Not Invisible, starts making waves.

Reminiscent of Gladys Knight but often displaying a deep vocal tic evocative of  Joan Armatrading, the album reveals a solid songwriting talent to complement her singing, from the torchy gospel influences of Right Now through the late night groove of Feels Like Heaven with its cool jazzy guitar and the 70s funky wah wah notes of Can’t Escape to hushed ballad And They Say It’s Not Love and the soaring, radio friendly anthemic pop soul of the title track. And, if you have to listen to her throw in some early Motown hits to keep the punters happy, there are far worse ways of spending the evening. 9.30pm. Free. The Jam House

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Friday January 7

Big Country

 

Exploding on to the British pop scene in 1982 with Fields Of Fire and their trademark of engineering the guitars to sound like bagpipes, the Fife four piece proved a huge success throughout the rest of the decade with their first three albums all reaching the top three in the UK charts. However, when 1988’s Peace In Our Time stalled at #9, it marked the beginning of a fall from favour. The following two albums failed to make the Top 20, 1995’s Why The Long Face? peaked at #48 and their final album, 1999’s Driving To Damascus, didn’t make it into the Top 50.

Having dropped out of sight not long after its release, singer Stuart Adamson returned for 2000’s Final Fling farewell tour, playing their last gig in October. In November the following year, Adamson again disappeared and, having suffered from alcohol problems for many years, committed suicide that December.

Seven years later, to commemorate the band’s 25th anniversary, founding members Bruce Watson, Mark Brzezicki and Tony Butler reunited for a UK tour and accompanying live album before returning to hiatus. However, the new year finds them back together, with Watson’s son Jamie joining the line-up and, as guest vocalist, the Alarm’s Mike Peters, a longtime fan joined Adamson to sing Neil Young's Rockin' In The Freeworld at the Final Fling’s Glasgow Barrowlands show. A less intense but no less passionate frontman, it’ll be an interesting spin on the nostalgia trip though what Scottish fans will make of a Welshman behind the microphone remains to be seen.

Support is another name from the even more distant past, Thunderclap Newman, the 1969 one hit wonders behind enduring quirky #1 Something In The Air. They broke up two years later. With founding members Speedy Keen and Jimmy McCulloch now both dead, the original trio’s sole survivor, pianist Andy Newman, resurrected the name last February for a series of date with a line up that featured Brzezicki on drums, a connection that’s undoubtedly behind their warm up slot tonight. 7.30pm. £20. O2 Academy

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Wednesday January 19

Smoke Fairies

Having whet appetites with a series of limited edition singles  and the Frozen Heart EP, former Chichester school choir friends Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire delivered on the promise with debut album Through Low Lights And Trees (V2).

Their name taken from the local term for the wisps that form from the evening mist on Suffolk country roads, it's a perfect description of their otherworldly sound and the spidery, spectral purity of their harmony voices.  Fuelled by their restless travelling years, it's a collection of songs about relationships blossoming and broke, about leaving, longing and loneliness, and change and transition. Summer Fades, with its catchy chorus, provides a deceptive relatively upbeat opening, but it’s all a bit emotionally downcast after that with the sedate folk lullaby Dragon finding the narrator wishing to join her fellow villagers into death to escape being alone, Storm Song comparing a wrecked relationship to nature’s devastation and the Americana meets madrigal  Erie Lackawanna featuring the chorus line of  'I can hear a wrecking ball coming for the house."

They favour stark metronomic rhythms, but, as rockier folk blues Hotel Room and the swampy slide riff of Strange Moon Rising show, that doesn’t mean they can’t also pack a sexual charge into their atmospherics. They need to introduce a  little more variation to the musical colours and the occasional less than desolate lyric wouldn’t go amiss, but between their nuanced vocal interplay and the organic nature of the guitars, they’re still one of the most exciting folk finds of the current decade. 8pm. £7. Glee Club

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Sunday January 23

Metronomy

Having failed to make much of a commercial impression with sophomore album Nights Out,  the electro pop trio has recast itself as a four piece, with singer guitarist Joe Mount and keyboardist Oscar Cash being joined by Gbenga Adelekan taking over from Gabriel Stebbing on bass with Lightspeed Champion’s Anna Prior on drums. The set will, naturally, feature reworked numbers from the last album, doubtless including Heartbreaker and The End Of You Too, but the emphasis is likely to be on road-testing material from recently completed follow up, The English Riviera, revealing any shift in direction and whether Mount still insists on maintaining that annoying falsetto. 8pm. £11. Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath

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Sunday January 23

The Walkmen

Although yet to translate critical acclaim into commercial success over here, the Washington, DC quintet  have, over the course of five increasingly progressing albums, built a considerable cult audience. They make their new year debut on the back of  recently released sixth album, Lisbon (Bella Union), another terrific collection of songs about regret, disappointment and, as they explicitly state on the jangling bounce of Juveniles, the us and them divide.

Maintaining their love of 50s rock n roll, mariachi horns, circling guitar riffs and surging choruses, Hamilton Leithauser’s gargling vocals lead them through a sterling set of  indie pop rock nuggets, from the buildingly anthemic Angela Surf City with its waves of guitars and snare drum rimshots and Blue As Your Blood with its Friday On Mind intro chug rhythm through the drunken lurching horns sway of Stranded’s echoes of Silent Night to Victory’s downcast fairground waltzer, the jovially deceptive buoyancy of Woe Is Me and Torch Song’s doo wop swaying drunken losers lullaby.

The tour may be slightly too late for delicate tinkling ballad While I Shovel The Snow to have timely resonance, but whatever the weather, the live forecast is good.  8pm. £13.50. Glee Club

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Monday January 24

Ani DiFranco

Refusing to play the corporate industry game, New Orleans based New Yorker DiFranco has been releasing albums on her own Righteous Babe label since her eponymous debut back in 1990. Since then, recording and performing both solo or with a group, she’s knocked up 20 studio and live releases, all characterised by her genre-hopping, experiments with time signatures, trademark staccato guitar style, range of instruments and sophisticated, frequently feminist, lyrics that deal with the personal and political in equally barbed and often autobiographical form.

I confess I lost track of her seven years ago after Evolve, an album that saw her return to solo mode and marry her folk leanings with Latin jazz funk and discordant beat cellar moods. Since then there’s been the equally solo Educate, Knuckle Down’s return to band format and expansive production, and Reprieve, recorded with just her and a double bassist, plus, Canon, her first career retrospective.

Most recently came 2008’s band album, Red Letter Day, a pretty representative set that musically ranges from the dreamy old fashioned acoustic folk of Way Tight and the lilting light jazz rhythms of Landing Gear to the scratchy funk strut of Emancipated Minor while the opening title track, a simmering bluesy folk cocktail spawned by Hurricane Katrina, is reprised as the closing number, a six minutes stretch out instrumental by the Rebirth Jazz Band.

Lyrically too, it’s typical DiFranco with songs variously addressing male godhead religions (the jungle line rhythms of Alla This),  love (late night jazz cellar vibe Round A Pole) and, on standout number The Atom, the triangle of nuclear fusion, ethics and religion. However, remarried and having recently become a mother, it’s also an unusually cheery affair packed with childhood and maternal images and numbers like the scuffed beats Smiling Underneath and Present/Infant positively radiating feelgood vibes.

She arrives in advance of new album, Mariachi. Although as yet unheard, live performances of new numbers If You’re Not, Unworry, Tired Old Face and Mariachi itself suggest a rootsier, folk blues sound, and she’ll also be including Which Side Are You On?, a union protest tune from the 30s popularised by Pete Seeger, that’s been a regular in her shows over the past couple of years. Which, along with titles like Hearse, Amendment and New Bible might suggest a political thrust.

She’s never embraced or (despite sometimes recalling Tori Amos) been embraced by the mainstream, but she’s sustained a large and loyal cult following and there should be little breathing space here tonight. 8pm. £18.50. Glee Club

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Friday January 28

Band Of Horses

Releasing their major label debut and breakthrough album, Columbia for Infinite Arms, last year, the Seattle boys make an early return to keep the flame burning for their 60s influenced brew of power pop and Americana. Jangling guitars and pedal steel colourings should be the order of the night with numbers like the spacey title track, Neil Young tinged lope Older, a fuzzed up Laredo and slow build ballad  Neighbour.

Main support comes from London kindred spirits Goldheart Assembly whose harmony country pop folk Wolves And Thieves blends the Everlys and Crowded House with cooing lap steel. Opening proceedings will be a warm-up return from hiatus by Mojave 3, doubtless roadtesting new material for the much anticipated follow up to 2006’s Puzzles Like You. 7pm. £16.50. O2 Academy

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Friday January 28/Saturday January 29

Richard Thompson

Recently made an OBE, while he may have ventured more into the latter half of the hyphenate Thompson’s been a prominent figure on the folk-rock scene since his early days with Fairport Convention, not to mention being hailed as one of the world’s greatest guitarists. Critical respect and loyal following hasn’t necessarily translated into commercial success. Although he’s fared better in America, while consistently greeted with critical praise, off the 20 albums recorded solo or with ex-wife Linda, only six have ever made the UK top 40, the most recent, Dream Attic (Proper), marking his highest position at #20.

It’s that which will form the backbone of this current jaunt and, having been recorded live on a previous tour as opposed to a studio production (although a bonus disc features acoustic demos), the new material has already been honed on the road. 

Mingling bluesy grooves like The Money Shuffle and Burning Man with more folk-rock infused numbers such as Here Comes Geordie, Sidney Wells and Demons In Her Dancing Shoes along with the rockabilly Haul Me Up and the country tinged rock n roll of Big Sun Falling On The River, it’s a fairly representative snapshot of Thompson’s work and style even if none of the songs are likely to find a place on a list of his finest alongside, for example, Dimming Of The Day, Wall Of Death, 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, Needle & Thread or When Will I Ever Be Simple Again. That said, if he’s in the same form tonight as he was when he recorded them in front of a clearly delirious audience, then there’ll be blisters on the paintwork.  8pm. £24.50/£19.50. Warwick Arts Centre

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Saturday January 29

Alexandra Burke

Beating JLS into second place on the 2008, Burke’s gone on to prove a worthy winner with what it takes to sustain a lengthy career. Although her winning single, a cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah, was a predictable #1, it was far from representative of what would follow on the debut album. The release of Bad Boys, in which she teamed with Flo Rida, firmly announced her dance floor direction and was solidly reinforced by the accompanying #1 album, Overcome (Syco) and numbers like the clattering Broken Heels, All Night Long with Pitbull and the Motown-styled Bury Me (6 Feet under) while The Silence and Overcome ably showed her r&b ballad chops.

It’s unfortunate to see her becoming part of the current record business rip-off of reissue albums as Deluxe Editions with the addition of a few new tracks, especially since the big ballad Perfect, glitterball sparkling Cobra Starship collaboration What Happens On The Dance Floor and Start Without You’s tropical dancehall shimmy with Laza Morgan (and a nursery rhyme melody that sounds very familiar) would have made a perfectly decent stand-alone EP.

Still, she deserves the success (hopefully making the same crossover to America as Leona Lewis) and, from appearances so far looks set to give a dazzling live performance too. 7.30pm. £27.50. NIA

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Saturday January 29

Ben Marwood

Having played support to the likes of Chris T-T, Frank Turner and Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly, the Reading  lo fi anti-folk singer-songwriter steps into his own spotlight with debut album Outside There’s A Curse (XtraMile). Armed with just acoustic guitar (and occasional pedal steel), a not especially distinctive voice and simple melodies, the attraction to his busker folk lies primarily in his witty, quirky and sometimes pointed lyrics.

Toil’s a disarming acceptance of mortality and I Will Breathe You In a skewed song of love and contrition but otherwise, it’s generally whimsical self-deprecation (Oh My Days, Singalong) and celeb culture references (JJ Abrams, Tell Avril Lavigne I Never Wanted To Be Her Stupid Boyfriend Anyway) masquerading as emotional angst.

Like his Postal District cover/homage, The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, it’s a rather dreary, slight listening experience and, while he might liven it up live he’s no Patrick Fitzgerald, arguably the man who started the whole anti-folk movement back in the days of punk. 1pm. Free (charity donations). Brighthouse, Hill St

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Sunday January 30

The Transatlantic Sessions

After last year’s inaugural success, the jewel in the crown of Glasgow’s annual Celtic Connections Festival takes to the road for a second time for  a celebration of Celtic folk and Americana’s shared musical roots.

Again featuring a mix of traditional and contemporary material, there’s an impressive line up of familiar faces and newer names. Handling the vocals, Scotland provides acclaimed trad performer Julie Fowlis,  Ireland’s represented by veteran singer-songwriter Paul Brady while flying the flag from over the ocean comes country star Allison Moorer and Grammy-winning gospel singer Ashley Cleveland with guitarist husband Kenny Greenberg.

Multi-instrumentalists  Tim O’Brien and Cold Mountain star Dirk Powell are back again and, as before, there’s a virtuoso house band, this time including Phil Cunningham, John Doyle, Mike McGoldrick, John McCusker, James Mackintosh and Donald Shaw. 7.30pm. £25.50. Symphony Hall

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Monday January 31

Roxy Music

Although they disbanded for two years in 1976 and then spent 18 in hiatus between 1983-2001, this tour marks the group’s 50th anniversary and, with the exception of Brian Eno, it reunites all the original members, Phil Manzanera,  Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson and, of course, Brian Ferry.  There’ll be no new material and Ferry’s ruled out the prospect of the foursome recording together again (though in the light of the lukewarm reception to the recent overcooked Olympia solo album, he might reconsider), but they’ll certainly be digging into the treasures of their shared past, Mind you, as they seem to almost never vary the set-list chances are they’ll be doing exactly the same as on the 2010 European leg with a running order that opens on Re-make/Re-model, ends with Jealous Guy and includes the likes of More Than This, Ladytron, In Every Dream Home A Heartache, Love Is The Drug Let's Stick Together and, obviously, Virginia Plain. No complaints about any of these, but given the ticket price would Dance Away and Avalon be too much to ask? 7.30pm. £50. LG Arena