Review: Pete Morton (with Gren Bartley support), Swan in the Rushes, Loughborough, Friday, February 3d, 2012...

Minus five here when I got back... but warmed by the musics that I almost avoided through inertia and the onset of a cold. And a surprisingly good turnout for the TappedButSettling gig at the Swan in the Rushes, Loughborough (God's Little Acre), given the weather. But PeteMorton will usually pull a crowd and with support from Gren Bartley it was always going to be never less than a good night. I knew I would have regretted it if I had stayed at home – because both these musicians are always moving relentlessly forwards and it would be a shame to miss bearing witness to their latest endeavours. Gren started the gig with mainly new material, abetted at the end by his friend on harmonies. Reining back slightly on his complex guitar playing and leaning more on the songs gave a different balance to a fascinating set. Then Pete came out of the blocks at terrible speed – his new material, jamming massive clusters of words into his lines like a rap artist, then whipping round to bring in a chorus on the old warhorse 'To be a farmer's boy,' his tirade against the falseness of so much contemporary life cutting a furrow back to simpler days, linking family and wider community. Blew me away, it has to be said. I don't entirely subscribe to his ideas but he certainly makes me think and Pete gets away with it because he isn't some ideologue, rather a deeply thoughtful musician with a line back to the English radical/Romantic tradition that is buttressed with much humour. His tack over the last couple of years seems to be word-crammed songs plus his new variants on the talking blues that roll out in fast streams (the rap adoption) then land suddenly on an apposite 'folk' chorus to provide a link backwards and also to bring in the audience, wrap them in the surge of his muse. A lot of resonations here – the cheekiest being that dreadful old McColl song 'Manchester Rambler' in the only version I've ever heard that I could take seriously. (My opinion – so, shoot me... ).You have to admire the chutzpah... saying 'Back at ya!' to the 'Revival/Tradition!'

Second half gave an opportunity for requests – 'Seven Billion Eccentrics,' 'Shepherd's Song,' 'Battle of Trafalgar,' 'Further,' and of course 'Another Train.' All of them celebrate people in the raw – one of the lines from 'Battle of Trafalgar,' written about a lock-in at a Leicester pub mentions the punters: 'You couldn't clone people like this in a million years,' and that is the common humanity in the best sense that he stands up for. Also rooted deep in an almost mystical 'England,' yet Pete is far from being a petty nationalist. 'Shepherd's Song,' his homage to John Clare reaches to a point where rural England was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and the coming modern age, eyed with trepidation by the poet who achieved brief fame in London before his collapse into madness, but who was also a musician skilled in the folk musics of his time. This double link with musical and literary traditions goes further with his recent forays as a stand up artist in the character of 'Geoff Chaucer' and Pete skilfully plays off the literary heritage with the folk music tradition that he comes out of at a diagonal, (via the initial energies of punk rock and street busking) and helps to transform and continue. The sharp vignettes of people in crowded day to day settings yet each unique goes back to the bustle and vibrancy of Chaucer's time and work. But far from any maddening academic stiflings and ignobled strifes, Pete is a man drunk on words and their permutations and resonances, jammed into the grittiness and possibilities of NOW. He just gets better... 

Grab a taste here...

All hail to Mr Marmion via TappedButSettling for setting up the gig... More, please...