Laura Marling
The Gov
10 June 2017
Tour support Tiny Little Houses physical resembled Fleet Foxes fronted by Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus with Pixies’ Joey Santiago thrown in for good measure. In this case, you can judge a book by the cover so I probably don’t have to describe what kind of music they played except to say that 90’s alternative music has reached such a saturation point that it has become middle of the road. Their set was a jukebox of postrock, Pixies/Pavement, Bright Eyes, Gerling and Wheatus (remember them?). Mid set, the bass player humorously apologised “for all the mistakes I’ve made, not just tonight but in general, in life”, endearing the band to an audience warming to their eclectic but overly familiar sound but it was quite obvious early on that they were not quite appropriate as to be the support for this show.
For Laura Marling’s set, the stage was decorated with plastic foliage and greenery adorning microphone stands and foldback amplifiers giving the stage an almost pastoral setting suggestive of an even more open air gig than the Gov usually can be made to be. Without any audience acknowledgment the band started with Soothing, the first song on Laura’s most recent album, Semper Femina, which dominated the set. The album was performed nearly in entirety, eight of nine songs, the first six songs replicating the order and sound of the album albeit with only a couple of transpositions. Live, “Soothing” is country rock rather than the trance/jazz from the album. One line into second song, “Wild Fire”, a girl’s enthusiasm came to the fore as she screamed “I love this song” and Laura Marling smiled wryly emphasizing the next line “You want to get high” prompting the band to join her in the humour of the moment. “Don’t Pass Me By” is less the introspective “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and more prominent than on the album. It is almost like a rock band Laura Marling cover-version, with guitarist Simon Ribchester segueing into a “Hotel California” solo before the song ends with the drum machine-like percussion that opens and closes the album version. The song seems out of context before she returns to a more familiar pastoral folk sound of “Always this Way”, Nick Pini switching from electric to double bass. “Next Time” has a wyrd folk feel, sounding contemporary to the original Wickerman soundtrack, with distracting camera-shutter percussion from drummer Matt Ingram and unsettling backing vocals by the Topolski sisters, Emma and Tamsin. Laura then did four songs alone, including a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “For The Sake Of The Song”, staring out above the audience, during which there was a quiet and intensity of listening that you can hear an almost indiscernible unknown electric hum. Early audience interaction was minimal until a break from the music when the returned band were introduced to compete in a trivia contest and this unfortunately was a distraction from the feel of the set as a whole.
As per her stated tradition of not doing an encore, there wasn’t one but the audience were satisfied, having been treated very well for the previous hour and a quarter.
Words by Jason Leigh
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