Postcard no 2 from Balham

Hi All,

Well, despite a multiple Tube journey involving three different lines through the Metropolis, we finally made it to balmy Balham in time for the second and third day of the four day Resonance Rock Festival.

The Bedford Arms in which it was being held is an expansive, impressive building, a Victorian pile full of dark carved wood and low slung antique leather sofas which made you feel as though you about to be swallowed up when you alighted upon them.

Its most distinctive feature is the central performance area, known as the Globe after Shakespeare’s famous theatre, because of its elevated minstrel’s gallery around the four sides of the stage, giving it an intimate atmosphere. Two other stages were constructed in the ballroom and on the top floor, where bands and fans were eyeball to eyeball.

The whole purpose of the festival was to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support, one of the UK’s leading charities in providing invaluable support to people with cancer and their families to help them through their most difficult of days.

As well as a star-studded cast, all the Resonance crew were giving freely of their time, their toughest tasks including lugging cabinets full of equipment up sizeable staircases and ensuring quick turnarounds between bands.

Those two days yielded plenty of surprises and delights, several of which I shall impart here over two blogs. The opening session on the Friday evening saw the mighty John Mitchell, producer, composer, guitarist and singer with It Bites, Frost*, Arena and Kino – to name but a few – in mellow mood with just an acoustic guitar and on keyboards, Liam Holmes, who delivered an eclectic selection of songs including Nat King Cole’s Smile and Floyd’s Comfortably Numb to which the attentive audience duly sang along.

This all felt a bit safe and familiar until a lion haired, wild-looking young rock dude came bustling onto the stage to join them who John Mitchell introduced as Nathan James. You may not have heard of him now but believe me, you will do so very soon.

From nowhere, Nathan launched into the most extraordinarily impromptu reading of Jesus Christ Superstar’s Gethsemene, not a song to be trifled with lightly at the best of times, especially in front of a strongly prog crowd.

Even with a simple acoustic setting, Mitchell, producer of his debut album under the band name of Inglorious and Holmes, Nathan’s musical director, were grinning widely as this 26-year-old unleashed only a fraction of the potential power of his monster voice.

Further research reveals that Nathan was a contestant on two television talent shows, BBC’s The Voice show to find brilliant new singers and also Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in which he was a finalist.

Since then, he has sung with Scorpions’ legend Uli Jon Roth and is now vocalist with prog theatre specialists Trans Siberian Orchestra. Catch him and them if you can.

It is no secret that Lifesigns was my favourite album of 2013, a heady combination of classical prog with lots of modern twists in its content and style, five individual songs being linked with a theme about life, the Universe and all things in between. For the record, Nick Beggs provided bass and vocal harmonies, while Robin Boult, Steve Hackett and Jakko Jakzszyk offered up some beautiful guitars and Thijs van Leer the intergalactic flute.

With Beggs touring the world with Steven Wilson, Steve Hackett and Kim Wilde, composer John Young went on a recruitment drive to find a bassist and guitarist to join him and drummer Martin “Frosty” Beadle. They found the Cardiacs’ Jon Poole as bass player and Steve Wilson guitarist Niko Tsonev to fill the vacant berths.

I was lucky enough to travel to the Leamington Assembly in March to witness the debut of Lifesigns live which was a revelation. Ten gigs later, Lifesigns in concert continues to grow in stature as a multi-faceted show, full of power and beauty. Poole has a full-on bass style which never tries to imitate Beggs while Tsonev has continued to develop and personalise the guitar parts to fully exploit the considerable range of his prowess.

The final act on Day Two was Also Eden, a band playing on the eyeball to eyeball stage, who have continued to forge a strong reputation through the release of their emblematic Think Of The Children album which they followed up last year with the widely acclaimed [Redacted].

Much of their material is written by their vocalist Rich Harding, who nearly died in a road accident soon after joining the band in 2010, suffering multiple fractures, a ruptured aorta and broken ribs. Hovering between life and death while in an induced coma has coloured his lyrics as he articulates a place where hopefully, none of us will ever venture.

Now with Mr So & So’s keyboard player Andy Rigler in to replace Howard Sinclair, their live show is both melodic and intense, guitarist Simon Rogers adding solid riffs throughout and a gorgeous waterfall effect on Chronologic. They really are a band who are as engrossing live as they are on record.

And so the curtain fell on day two at Resonance. Day three promised even more with one of the most heavenly singers around on show.

* Nathan James performs with the Trans Siberian Orchestra. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utjo6iJ8A_I

Let’s face it, it’s hard to bottle lightning. Rock docs, whether they’re concerts or biopics or even music videos, succeed when the veil is lifted and performers face their own vulnerability. Because this is a state of being for Rush, the films about them, even non-descript concert videos, are generally quite good. This list is really a starter for myself, and I share it in hopes that in the comments below our readers will add other favorites.

1. La Villa Strangiato at PinkPop, 1979. Smoking. This is Rush live in the 1970s at their very best. Thank the prog gods someone had the presence of mind to film it. La Villa Strangiato is one of their most popular pieces, but the band attributes the complexity of it and the album from which it came, Hemispheres, to their shift toward shorter pieces as the 70s turned into the 80s. This appears to be the only clip from the show, although the entire concert is available as audio on YouTube as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78D00dYOBrM

2. Beyond the Lighted Stage. Beyond the Lighted Stage is a successful long-form band documentary, a rarity in rock, which as a performance art often fares better in conceptualized concert films. The film benefits from the full participation of its main actors, a well-selected and articulate supporting cast of fellow musicians, family and fans, and most importantly a directness and honesty that neither discounts nor over-rates Rush’s place in popular music. Of course it’s no surprise given the band’s history and its members’ personalities that such a project should work, but when Geddy Lee announces at the end of the film that he warned the production crew, “Don’t be surprised when you discover how boring we really are,” the takeaway is two-fold. First, many rock docs manage to show little beyond how mundane the rest of a rocker’s life is, as we find that most great musicians are successful by virtue of their absorption in their art and have little to say outside of it; second, that the depth of their integrity as an artistic entity and the basic good-guyness of each of the members of Rush as individuals — nothing more, nothing less, as they would tell you — sets them apart, and compared to many of their peers in the rock world makes them truly unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-MwVUUy3g

3. Classic Albums: 2112 and Moving Pictures, 2010. The Classic Albums series, first broadcast on VH1 umpteen years ago with hour-long profiles of albums by the Band, the Grateful Dead, and Fleetwood Mac, remains a marvelous program dedicated to the dissection of key albums in rock history. I never saw one that didn’t have something to add to what I knew about an album already. The series turns its eye to not one but two of Rush’s records, and runs almost two hours. Made around the same time as Beyond the Lighted Stage, it amplifies the details of Rush’s most famous albums. While much of the story of these records is known, it’s refreshing to see Rush sitting at the mixing board with producer Terry Brown, talking about how the tracks were actually laid down.

4. The Colbert Report, 2008. I think many fans value this appearance by Rush on the Colbert Report as a recognition that those of us who love Rush will not be denied. Colbert gets it, in the same way he has the measure of the rest of American culture. Although marginalized by the music press, Rush was never a cult band — their album sales and sold-out concerts put the lie to that idea. What is maddening is the casual dismissal of the band by hipster rock journalists and others who just don’t get it. Not getting it is cool — in fact, few Rush fans get into all of Rush’s records (there are, after all, many sides to this band) — but given their substantial influence there was something more than a little insidious in their barring from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for 14 years. As Colbert comments in his inimitable way, “That’s bullshit.”

https://myspace.com/james_yyz/video/rush-on-the-colbert-report/50001106

5. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech, 2013. Equal parts grace, joy, and humor, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better set of speeches accepting the rock and roll honor of honors. Lifeson’s now infamous, hilarious “Blah blah” performance underscores what both Peart and Lee are getting at, that for an award that wasn’t supposed to mean so much to them, it actually meant a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKuO1FpCWRI

6. Xanadu, Exit Stage Left, 1981. Rush have been documenting their live shows every few years, starting in 1976 with All the World’s a Stage. I’m including this version of Xanadu because, beyond being among my favorite Rush songs, it captures the vibe of a Rush show and was recorded for the film in a less than polished manner, so really has a live grit to it. This is full on double-neck splendor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JAA90BRp6o

7. Come On Children. Google around and you’ll find various clips of this Allan King documentary, released in 1972 and featuring a 17-year-old Alex Lifeson. Documenting a fabricated months-long social experiment, in which teenagers are sent out to live on a “farm” without any adults, Come On Children is certainly a product of its era, and while now more associated with Lifeson and his renown, the film very effectively provides a window into the larger environment from which Rush emerged.

8. Halo Effect, Dallas, 2012. There are worse things in rock than the modern concert video — the swoopingly overwrought crane shots, vast stages, the polished cosmeticism — but I can’t think of many. The bland emotional impact is rarely rewarding. I’m including this performance from Dallas from 2012 because even though it suffers from some of those problems, it shows what a great live band Rush still is as well as the maturity of songwriting on “Halo Effect,” from Clockwork Angels. It’s a beautiful song, full of love and regret, a personal song, and not typically Rush even though Peart is writing in a typical mode for him, through an invented first person. Hearing Geddy Lee singing in a register fitting the new songs is nice, since a lot of the older material finds him straining these days (no discredit to him, mind, those songs are age challenging). Alex Lifeson’s intro, not on the studio version, is masterful, an overture that touches on the themes in the song without being just the song, and is redolent of Jimmy Page’s live electro-drone folk outings with Led Zeppelin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKsMYsb47s

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