The sixth in a series of Loose Music nights at the Betsey Trotwood pub, the night provided a low-key and intimate alternative to the Glastonbury festival, although those who made the trip out to Farringdon in London were entertained by a special guest, Will Varley, who was actually appearing on The Other Stage at Worthy Farm on Sunday.
To see an act as talented as Will Varley in the smallest room in the Betsey Trotwood was a huge treat. Will has sold out venues as prestigious as the Union Chapel and Shepherd’s Bush Empire but was here performing to around 50-odd people as a warm-up for his full band show at Glastonbury later the same weekend. Will Varley hasn’t managed to perform live for around 18 months because of problems he’s had with his throat, but his expressed preference tonight was to perform songs he doesn’t usually play live. This proved to be something of a mixed blessing for him, given the difficulties he encountered in recalling the lyrics to some of his songs. Nonetheless, we were still treated to an extraordinary thirty minutes of his music, which included the darkly misanthropic Weddings and Wars – something of a history of the world in under four minutes – The Postman, a song supposedly inspired by Ferdinand Cheval, a French postal worker whose odd habit of collecting stones on his route eventually resulted in one of the greatest achievements of outsider architecture, the Palais Idéal, and one of his newer songs, Never Get Tired of Loving You. Will is playing at several festivals in August, and I urge you to seek him out if you’re not already familiar with his material.
If Will Varley was something of a tough act to follow, then it was still pleasing to see an opportunity afforded to young singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ollie Cook from Wolverhampton. Showcasing songs from his album, The Boy With Pearls For Eyes, he was ably accompanied by Elliot Smith on guitar. Particular standout songs were Six Eight and the gently strummed Candy Moon, his most streamed song to date, which sounded something akin to Sparklehorse at their most reflective—definitely one to watch.
Headlining tonight’s show was Dundee-based singer-songwriter Roseanne Reid. Performing solo with her acoustic guitar, she opened with the gentle, fingerpicked All I Need, a love song for her wife, although a lot of tonight’s songs take on something of a different dimension over the course of the evening given recent developments in Roseanne’s life. If the second song to follow initially sounded incredibly similar to All I Need, then that was because Roseanne had temporarily forgotten she’d already started her set with the same song. Clearly, the complete absence of sleep the previous evening caused by having a two-year-old son played some havoc with her original setlist. However, Roseanne’s overwhelming honesty and vulnerability meant that she had the audience entirely on side from the beginning, and there were no false starts thereafter. Instead, we were fortunate enough to get a set list largely comprising the best songs from her debut album, Trails (produced by Teddy Thompson) and latest release, Lawside, deservedly nominated for UK Album of the Year at the UK Americana Music Awards. There were also forays into her EP, Horticulture, for the song Passing Through, a lovely meditation on accepting the small part each individual plays in the world, as well as A Different Kind of Brave, a song from forthcoming documentary, Love and Trouble. It’s a tune about the challenges of an ex-serviceman returning from a conflict zone and the difficulties of adapting to life on Civvy Street – what Mary Gauthier so perfectly described as “The War After The War”.
Call It Love, the first single from Roseanne’s Lawside album, is no less enjoyable for the absence of brass, which features on the record, while Levi, a favourite song from her debut, is quietly devastating in its depiction of unrequited love. In contrast, Made Just For You expresses the simple joys of being a mother. If anything establishes what a relative step up in quality the Lawside album represents in terms of Roseanne Reid’s self-assuredness as a writer, then it’s in the lyrics to her exceptional song, What Constitutes A Sin. Reid describes this tonight as one of her “existential crisisy songs”, but it’s actually as lyrically sophisticated a number as exists in the Americana-folk canon – a wry look at mortality which was clearly cathartic for Reid.
Roseanne’s commitment to a philosophy of “total honesty” and her reference to a recent marital breakdown means that some of tonight’s numbers, such as I Love Her So, can’t help but make all present interpret her songs in something of a new light, but there’s no shortage of joy in the recounting of the support she received from a Norwegian who provided some yodelling support for her at Camp Copperhead, the songwriting workshop run by one of her guiding lights, Steve Earle – a story which precedes Daisy Chain, an appropriate song under the circumstances, which points up the mess of contradictions at the heart of all relationships.
She ends the evening with Dougie Maclean’s Caledonia, which Roseanne says she’d only played twice since her high school days. It’s followed by an encore in the form of Mona Lisa, which is perfect as a finale in its rousing, Celtic singalong feel.
None of the acts on tonight’s bill actually feature on the Loose Music record label, which is a testament to label boss Tom Bridgewater’s commitment to simply putting on an evening of fine music. He had told me prior to the performance that his aim was to foster a sense of community and present opportunities for musicians and songwriters that he loved. In this aim tonight, he was fully vindicated.