Kings Place is a modern concert hall located under the offices of The Guardian and conveniently placed for King’s Cross Station, Pancras railway and Underground stations. It’s also but a stone’s throw from the developing area alongside the nearby canal, where run-down buildings have been renovated, new ones built, and a lively area is developing for hanging out amidst shops and coffee bars. It’s certainly a different place compared to a few decades back, and that’s a positive if you happen to have an hour to kill before the Mary Gauthier matinee.
Yes, matinee – having previously appeared at venues such as the much larger Union Chapel, for this visit to London, Gauthier had chosen the smaller, but not small, Kings Place main hall, with demand being so high that a second show had been added in the afternoon. It was a pleasing prospect for Gauthier, who took to the stage singing the praises of doing a matinee.
Despite having as a projected backdrop the cover of the most recent album “Dark Enough to See the Stars“, there were actually only a couple of songs taken from that record – the title track and the lovingly gentle ballad ‘The Meadow.’ It’s a song that makes a good contrast to ‘About Time‘, where Gauthier concentrates on all the good things of a relationship and tries to ignore the passing of years – it’s full of love, but tinged deeply with anxieties and concerns.
The appearance of new songs, such as the co-write with Jaimee Harris ‘Alcohol and Adderall‘ – the dark story of a young girl who dances for money and mixes too many drugs with too many drinks – also hints at the possibility of a new album to come.
There’s a nice touch, when Gauthier speaks of an early helping hand provided by Dylan, who featured a song of hers on his radio show, of having the tape of his introduction to the song as the proof that it really happened. “How did that happen?” she adds, before what has become her signature song: ‘I Drink‘, which takes on an additional layer of irony when singing the lines “I don’t need another lover / Hanging ’round, trying to make me change” with Jaimee Harris’ accompaniment.
Touching on the 25th Anniversary tour of “Drag Queens In Limousines” – which has gone on so long that it’s now the 26th Anniversary tour – brought us the slow and intricate ‘Our Lady Of The Shooting Stars‘, which more than hints at some Townes Van Zandt inspiration. It’s a song that resonates with tension. ‘Falling Out Of Love‘ from the “Mercy Now” album is a slow blues which is similarly tense; its imagery might bring to mind Dylan, but in this acoustic version, it’s not so far from Richard Thompson either. But Mary Gauthier isn’t defined by either of those references – she’s very much her own songwriter whether it’s on the click-clack tale of the end of hoboing (‘Last of the Hobo Kings‘) or the superficial thanks that veterans might receive (free waffles on veterans day) as described on ‘Bullet Holes In The Sky‘ which drips with irony.
With a closing cry for “more matinees“, the early evening came to an end with ‘Mercy Now‘, a song whose cry for kindness and reconciliation seems to get more and more appropriate “My Church and my Country could use a little mercy now / As they sink into a poisoned pit / That’s going to take forever to climb out.” Mary Gauthier is a class songwriter, thoughtful and with a singular voice – getting to see her, this time, in a relatively small room with the relaxed intimacy that encouraged was a real privilege.
Jaimee Harris had started the afternoon with a set of songs which highlighted her skills as a songwriter – it is a stroke of genius to write a song about being the ‘Opening Act‘, a song which allows Harris to play with the audience, singing about playing and not being listened to by the people who are keen to hear the headliner. Singing that song to a room of attentive listeners, hanging on every syllable. It’s a humorous statement, and it may have been Harris’ experience once, but we all know she’s well past that now.
When Harris shows her serious side, it does veer towards the very serious, and she spoke movingly about being inspired to write ‘Orange Avenue‘ when in Orlando and on the street where the Pulse nightclub mass shooting – at the time America’s largest mass shooting – took place. The song is from the point of view of the spirit of the one person whose name has been left off the list of the murdered – because his family didn’t know he was gay. Unsurprisingly, it’s a hard hitter: “no one came to claim my body / until this happened no-body in my family knew / my Father would not weep for me / that’s why I’m crying on Orange Avenue.” New songs – from an album planned for next year – touch on the need to resist what’s happening politically in the States, and with a particular regard to the rolling back of women’s rights, very much thinking along the lines of keeping vigilant because things that have been done can still be undone.
Harris has in her repertoire a real heartbreaker of a love song in the hopeful ‘Love Will Come Again.‘ And she also has some pretty funny anecdotes – such as Ray Wylie Hubbard telling her, on the Outlaw Country Cruise, to spice up her story about being caught DUI because “there’s nothing cool” about saying it was on the way back from a Carol King & James Taylor tribute concert. All bases covered, and a great way to start the afternoon.
