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Live Review
by SashaS
6-5-2002
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More on: Grant-Lee Phillips
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| GLP, ready for close encounter |
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Live: Grant-Lee Phillips
Shepherds Bush Empire, London
Sunday, May 5, 2002
Grant-Lee Phillips brings his one-man show, with a violinist, to London’s delight
Just a few summers ago it looked like, upon the disbandment of Grant Lee Buffalo, the career of the frontman was going nowhere fast. He couldn’t find a record label to issue his solo album ‘Ladies Love Oracle’ and he posted it online. The response was such that the record companies had to take notice and make the current album, ‘Mobilize’, available in the normal formats. But all this seems to be deep past as Grant-Lee Phillips presents his current artistry as one-man-show with a violinist.
The theatre is comfortably full for this all-seated show in front of which GLP, dressed in a black-suit-white-shirt-tie, with his two-tone shoes, looks like a crooner on a way for an engagement at the legendary Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Do not panic, there is little crooning here tonight, this is pop-rock stripped to its bare essentials, the proverbial acid-test, instrument-vocal only. And this voice knows how to express an incredible range that switches from tenor to falsetto or fortissimo with an ease of a blink.
Guitar, alternating with piano – “It gives a touch of class to any occasion” he quips happily – and one-off banjo-and-harmonica that “Will bring class right down.” Phillips is in good humour and cracks jokes on his own account and, alluding to his stubbled cheeks, he says he is getting ready for a part in a stage version of ‘Perfect Storm’. There is no danger of sinking here and when piano-harmonica-violin unison occurs, it transport us to a place not often visited.
GLR’s music is about the life-road we temporarily pollute with our petty issues usually blamed on someone else. “Love’s a mystery/She holds a key to every crime” (of flesh?), he intones at one point, adding to an avalanche of feelings… Songs from the current album – ‘See America’, ‘Sadness Soot’, elegiac ‘Beautiful Dreamers’ – are mixed with earlier cuts that are welcomed with mini-ovations as soon as recognized…
This sombre-but-joyous atmosphere is punctuated by ‘incidents’ such as GLP performing a few bars of ‘Somebody To Love’ by Queen. He delivers in earnest an astounding version of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’, with such bravado that effectively it is a different song. The violinist helped to enrich the sound but this is solely Phillips’s gig where guitar can be as quiet as an embrace but also as loud as a climax. GLP makes as much, but bettered, noise as the band he fronted.
Grant-Lee Phillips’s performance is re-invigoration of a singer-songwriter status – very few people can do it credibly like this man – in the world that finds talent-allergy so appealing.
SashaS
6-5-2002
Grant-Lee Phillips’s album ‘Mobilize’ is out now on Cooking Vinyl
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