Eugene Chadbourne
The Vortex, London
08/09/10

Eugene Chadbourne - Banjo, guitar
Roger Turner - Guitar
John Russell - Drums, percussion

A rare UK gig, this, from Eugene Chadbourne, one of music’s true one-offs and surely free post-punk country-and-western music’s finest proponent. It’s been five years, apparently, since his last visit to the UK, but it’s been considerably longer since my own last sighting of him, which was at a concert in Brighton salvaged from one of my own disastrously unsuccessful attempts at music promotion. Thankfully some nice people from the LMC stepped in to save the day, and the event, a duet with Jimmy Carl Black (sometime drummer and vocalist for The Mothers of Invention) was a triumph. At the Vortex this time around, Chadbourne was paired with another drummer, Roger Turner, and with fellow guitar iconoclast John Russell, for an opening duet and a brief concluding trio.

Chadbourne played much of his opening duet on a five string banjo, switching at one point to an electric - or semi-electric - guitar. Russell seemed to set the pace, and Chadbourne mostly responded to Russell’s high-speed, hard-scrabble plucking with comparably light-hearted and light-fingered skittering, with merely abstracted echoes of his trademark blues and bluegrass derivations. And yet, Chadbourne was able to draw from Russell something rather more tender than his often astringent style usually permits. The more attacking Russell was, Chadbourne would counter more playfully. Their duet, however, was at its most compelling during its slower and more spacious passages. All their stylistic mirroring and counterpoint made the music interesting rather than purely enjoyable, and never much more than the sum of its parts, no matter how compelling.

After the first break Russell sat out, to be replaced by his long-term sparring partner, Konk Pack percussionist Roger Turner. I don’t know how familiar with each other Chadbourne and Turner were, but it was an inspired pairing. You would need to be there to see the shared sense of humour play itself out in glances of mutual appreciation and in the interconnectedness of their physical interactions; it was as evident in the music as it was in Chadbourne’s casual rolling of his trouser legs above the knee, like a Coney Island sun-seeker. The set was one uninterrupted sequence of free interplay punctuated by songs, mostly covers but also one or two Chadbourne originals. They deftly transitioned from Nick Drake’s “Thoughts of Mary Jane” through a passage of the most scratchily abrasive abstraction to the driving electric riff of Johnny Burnette’s take on that hoary old rock ?n’ roll classic “The Train Kept a-Rollin’ “. Then came Gram Parson’s “Hickory Wind”, and a duet of lightly drawn, isolated and fleeting sonic events sounding rather like an attenuated Carl Stalling score. This in turn developed into a take on Muddy Waters’ “Catfish Blues”, closer in spirit to its interpretation by Jimi Hendrix than to the original. To all of these numbers Chadbourne bought twists of his characteristically idiosyncratic free jazz and the pungent savour of the old America, as championed by Harry Smith on his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. That anthology was represented in the set list by Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I’d Rather be a Mole in the Ground”. Throughout the song cycle, Turner’s deft touch on his ?prepared’ drum kit engaged Chadbourne in some terrific free interplay. He followed “Mole” with a percussion solo, one stick on what I think was a plasterer’s trowel. After that the intrusion of a too-long unanswered mobile phone appeared to break the duos hitherto telepathic momentum. What followed was less compelling and seemed to flow with less ease. Renditions of Chadbourne’s original composition after Brecht & Weill, “People Will Vote for Whoever Gives Them Food”, and then bluegrass musician Scott Gates’ “No one Left to Weep” (which I admit I had to Google) seemed rather laboured, though the latter inspired Chadbourne to some particularly harsh and driven playing. Perhaps he sensed that the momentum had waned.

After a second planned break, Chadbourne, Turner and Russell returned to the stage for a trio and Chadbourne and Turner got things underway more aggressively than before, channelling some of the driven energies of rock music. To this - once some technical difficulties had been ironed out by the in-house sound technician - John Russell added some surprisingly harsh amplified guitar. Togerther they made a sweet, galvanizing noise, welcome in its brevity.

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