It was a hot evening in London as the audience for Maisy Owen’s first London show gathered at the Theatreship moored at Docklands’ South Quay. The ship is a converted barge with outside and inside bars and a seated music room, with, as happy audience members discovered, air conditioning. There was a reasonably sized crowd for a first show; especially given the competing attraction of England’s World Cup game with Ghana.
Owen took the stage with pedal steel legend BJ Cole at 21:00 and told us she would be playing her one album plus some other songs to flesh out the set. What we got was the first five songs from debut Dark On A Sunny Day, followed by a selection of other songs, then back for the closing three.
The set began with My Youth Is All For You with Cole’s steel tracking the song’s melody and a hint of reverb supplementing Owen’s vocal. What’s immediately striking is her ease in front of the audience and her command of the material. She tells us she has a BBC 6 Music session the following day and then gigs in Sheffield and back in London. This trip is her first time outside the United States.
Next up is Letters with Owen’s guitar picking taking on a distinctly folkie feel before she introduced the album’s title track, Dark On A Sunny Day. We learn that the album cover photograph was shot at an abandoned hotel outside Nashville. The fourth song, The Rest Of Me, begins with Owen and guitar only before Cole joins later in the song. For On My Way Down, the maestro switches to dobro, offsetting the song’s folkie melody nicely.
Setting up the middle section of the set, Owen tells us she only had so much time to rehearse and share songs with Cole, so he will be taking a back seat for a while. We learn she is working on an EP which will be out later in the year. After a brief back-and-forth with the audience, she introduces a song about cicadas, followed by Stranger, a song inspired by an abandoned amusement park outside New Orleans. Owen acknowledges the abandoned places may be something of a theme. It runs into Undertow, another new song which features some fine spidery picking.
Stained is up next with its haunting “how cruel are the summer days” line. It’s followed by Farewell Blue Days with its sweet folk melody. Indigo brings us to the end of the non-album segment, after which Cole rejoins as they play a cover of Townes van Zandt’s Fare The Well Miss Carousel. She tells us this will likely be on the forthcoming EP.
The reaction from the audience has been appreciative and enthusiastic all night, and Owen’s relaxed and easy manner belies some of the dark content of the songs. She resumes the album tracking with I Can Be Just Like You, with its hypnotic refrain, before dropping into God Fear.
The last song from the album and the last song of the night is It All Ends The Same, inspired by an abandoned nuclear plant outside Nashville. The song features some distorted pedal steel from Cole. She really does have a thing for abandoned buildings.
With that, Maisy Owen’s London debut is done, and she heads for the merch table. It has been an excellent concert, and I suspect it won’t be long before she returns to these shores at a bigger venue. For those who can’t wait, she has announced she will be showcasing at the AMA’s AmericanaFest this September in Nashville.
Support for the evening came from guitarist Joe Harvey-Whyte, who played a set of ambient music on his acoustic guitar, supplemented by field recordings of water and birds which he had collected in the Hebrides travelling on his VW bus. From opener Tyburn to a closing Wild Mountain Thyme, he held the audience’s attention.
