This was one of those nights where nothing was how it should have been. I turned up so fashionably late (well, just after 8.30) that when I went to go in and said I was there to see Sterling Roswell, the guy on the door told me they'd just started to play the last song of their set. Whoops!
Well, I went in anyway and went straight to the gig room. Inside, Sterling's was busy promoting his new Call Of The Cosmos album with a band that includes George Frakes on second guitar. They were already playing the instrumental freak out that finished the set to about 20 people. They sounded great and I really wish I had got there in time to hear all of the set. It really was over far too quickly.
Tonight was also my first visit to the Water Rats since part of the ceiling caved in. Now, to stand under the caved in roof or the not yet caved in roof, that was the question. I ended up sitting under the not caved in roof hoping it stayed that way.
After the break it was time for Arrows Down, or rather Tom from Arrows Down as for much of the set he performed solo on Acoustic Guitar and he has a really great tone to his picking and playing. I could quite easily sit and listen to him play guitar all night.
Sadly, I wish I could say the same about his singing, for his songs grated a bit. The room had only about 15 people in it for Arrows Down and seemed to revolve a bit with quite a few people finding him a bit much and going back into the bar.
The best song he had was the one about Leaving and walking out on a relationship. He seemed too young to have had the problems he sang about. However, he was then joined by a second guitarist who seemed to play like John Sebastian to Tom's Nick Drake-style picking on Ether and Tethered.
Then it was back to the solo stuff and I just wish he stopped singing and just played as none of the songs really stuck in my head while that guitar playing certainly did. He may need to just go and play guitar in a band rather than front it.
By the time tonight's headliner, late 80's/early 90's indie legend TOM HINGLEY came on there were just 4 of us in the gig room which compared to the last time I saw him fronting Inspiral Carpets at a festival in front of about 20,000 people was a bit of a shock really.
I would say the room filled up a bit as the set went on but at no point was there ever more than 9 people in the gig room and that included the sound man and the promoter!! More shocking still was the fact that Tom had driven 200 miles to play to such a tiny audience.
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He opened with a new song about Leaving It All Behind and it certainly seems like he had left it all behind. Somehow, he didn't sound bitter or angry between songs but grateful to those of us who had stayed out to see him. The closest he came to sounding bitter was on the new song Suck Cess (well I guess that's how he spells it) as it is about what being successful in the music business is like and what it does to you and those around you. It was heartfelt indeed.
That was followed by what was the centerpiece of his set, I Don't Want To Be A Fighter Anymore: a song he dedicated to his father. Tom told us a touching story about how he had been arguing and not exactly on the best of terms when his father died and how the song was about his dad's experiences in the army. It suffered a bit from lots of tuning and re-tuning his guitar and morphed from a folk ballad and into a blues solo and a rather angry tune and back again. It really needed to be played to a packed venue and not the wide open space it fell upon tonight.
He then delved into a little of the old material and we got a decent, slightly angry version of I Want You that was followed by a nice version of Two Worlds Collide that had the sparse audience singing along as if they were part of one of those mass singalongs of old. The last of the hits he played was This Is How It Feels: still fine even stripped of the full band and sung passionately, almost in spite of the circumstances.
He then thanked us all for coming and plugged his autobiography ('Carpet Burns') that was for sale afterwards before closing with another new song, Good, which revisited the earlier tuning problems but seemed as decent a way as any to close.
It must have been pretty disheartening to travel all that was to play to so few of us, but Tom did let us know he still has two more London shows before the year is out. I hope for his sake they attract better audiences than this one did.
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