The Timmins family (and a close friend) band has reached the milestone of forty years as a band and forty years since their debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, and for their current tour, they have no need of a support band; two decent-length sets from a band who really know what they are doing is one definition of gig perfection. It did mean that an early arrival at the stunningly beautiful London Palladium was required for the on-stage time of 7:30PM, and there were more than a few people who had got caught out by that, arriving just a song or two before Cowboy Junkies left the stage for their interval break, which was a shame, because it had been quite the first set.
Considering their sound, it’s quite fitting that Cowboy Junkies have adopted a stage presence which places Margo Timmins front and centre, with a songbook and a vase of cut flowers, whilst the rest of the band tends to lurk in the shadows to the sides and back of the stage. Margo is the focus, the singer and the introducer of songs and sharer of anecdotes. Only Pete Timmins was anywhere near as visible, and it is quite difficult to hide the drummer. The band was rounded out with their regular musical collaborator, Jeff Bird.
The first set leaned heavily into Such Ferocious Beauty, the latest studio release from Cowboy Junkies, starting with a spine-tingling Hell Is Real, a folk-blues which makes no concessions to any consolation of religion as the threat of damnation “hell is real hell is hot” is coupled with the equally intimidating “Jesus is coming, ready or not.” It’s an apocalyptic vision that’s carried forward into the electric A Common Disaster, which pushes into the same sense of being on the brink of the end of the world. Like all great songs, it melds itself to the times, triggering different thoughts now when Margo sings “I found myself a friend, but he’s crooked as a stick in water” than it might have when it appeared thirty years ago. There’s plenty of bite in Michael Timmins’ guitar playing, evoking a Southern Gothic feel.
For the first song introduction, before What I Lost, Margo Timmins balances the inspiration for the song, her father’s descent into dementia, literally losing memories on a daily basis, with the uplifting thought that as she looks out into the audience and sees so much grey, she realises that we are probably already starting our own journeys down that path. It’s a song that effortlessly blends rock with a storytelling intensity reminiscent of Jacques Brel. It emphasises, though, that Margo Timmins is one of rock’s premier front persons, even if she confesses to nerves when she sees people leave during the set. That may be true, but she’s still in complete control of the music.
Returning to Such Ferocious Beauty for Hard to Build, Easy to Break offers yet another contrast; there’s a smattering of the Velvet Underground to this song, a slow, powerful groove that again seems to speak to our times, who can this Canadian band be thinking of with lines like, “All the future Kings and all the future Queens standing, impatient, in a row. All the future Kings and all the future Queens looking like the heroes of their show“? We could be at the Graduation, we could be in a ballroom somewhere else.
It was all the way back to the group’s real breakthrough album, The Trinity Sessions, for 200 More Miles; a song that came out of touring their debut across the States, having smuggled themselves in without work papers and on long, long, drives, encountering and falling in love with country music. Canadian radio stations having had more of a bent towards folk. And they fell hard, with the great country road song followed by another country classic, ‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel, albeit one which has a touch of Dylan or Tom Russell about it in some of the lyrics. It’s a tribute to Cowboy Junkies how many musical strands they seem to have woven together into their wide-ranging sound, never stuck inside one genre for too long. These older songs do elicit the wry comment “Still doing the same thing – but getting paid for it.” The first set was closed with another debut album song: Forgive Me starts off close to an electric blues that John Lee Hooker would recognise, before setting off into a starker psychedelic rock direction; it’s slow and drifts like a misty Apocalypse Now opium-fever dream. It took us to the interval, with the promise that Sweet Jane was coming.
It certainly was – it opened the second set – a reminder that here is a band who has, as one of their signature songs, a cover, and within their repertoire many covers. That’s fairly unusual for a band of the stature of Cowboy Junkies, but it puts them, if not sonically, into the same sphere as the Grateful Dead: hugely admired and loved song interpreters, who also have a vast catalogue of their own. This slow and buzzing Sweet Jane was all anyone could have wanted it to be. Cowboy Junkies further demonstrated the depth of their music with Circe And Penelope, which offered a complete change of mood with this look at the Greek myths relayed as pure folk, with the ever-present harmonica giving it that Canadian touch. It’s slow and brooding with plenty of space for Michael’s soloing. This led into an acoustic mini-set with just Michael playing and Margo singing on the jazzy Working On A Building and the surviving-it-all song Angels in the Wilderness.
Missing Children took us back into a harder rock territory. Such Ferocious Beauty has found the Junkies embracing a tougher sound with lyrics that can still be beautiful, but here can also be dripping with scorn. It’s funky as hell, and is a great lift after all that introspection – much as we all love that.
The final encores showed a willingness to please the crowd, as many cries for Misguided Angel were finally rewarded, digging deep into the band’s country side again, before there was a final dip into the blues with a wailing After Midnight led to a long-standing ovation. So, no Neil on this night, but it had still been quite the evening; musically, Cowboy Junkies are only getting better, and Margo’s voice is quite spookily intact, presumably helped by the constant stream of fresh mugs of tea. Literate lyrics, an exceptionally together band with Peter Timmins and Alan Anton holding down a rhythm section that effortlessly drives the sound along meandering by-ways and side tracks in support of the electric mandolin or guitars. After forty years, this is an undiminished band, even with their most recent music, a band still finding new and exciting directions to take them through the next couple of decades.
