"I don't normally say this," ventures a bemused and slightly piqued Sean O'Hagan, "but I can't hear myself above the noise of people talking. Could you keep it down please? We've not played here for a long time, we play quiet music and there are people out there who want to hear us."
Outwardly, such an (admittedly gentle) outburst might seem like typically petty 'rock star' behaviour, but on this occasion it's difficult not to be on the side of the artist. It's a wet and windy Saturday night and THE HIGH LLAMAS are braving the elements coming to us via a free Beamish-related promotion at a venue on the outskirts of town. To dismiss them as little more than lift muzak as half of tonight's crowd are keen to do is a bit shit, frankly.
Because, where a band like The High Llamas are concerned, it's all about subtlety, nuance and the devil in the details, and after the full-frontal sonic assaults of bands your reviewer has seen in recent times (British Sea Power, The Duke Spirit and Editors especially spring to mind) it makes a refreshing change to enjoy a band out to achieve more than bludegeoning a small club full of inebriated disciples into submission of a Saturday night.
OK, your reviewer concedes O'Hagan and co have slipped from his radar somewhat since their halcyon critics' favourites era of the mid-90s when albums like "Gideon Gaye" and "Hawaii" featured strongly in writers' polls, but tonight's generous hour and a half still proved to be a diverting affair with enough twists and subtle changes of pace to continually enthrall.
Musically, The High Llamas are an affable, forty-something bunch of coves. Yes, they display the inevitable muso tendencies, but they colour O'Hagan's Brian Wilson/ Les Baxter-influenced songs to perfection and indeed your reviewer spent most of the set marvelling at the wonders of watching an on-form vibraphone player only a few feet away: probably the first time he's had such a pleasure since watching Max Beesley with the early Paul Weller Movement line-up the best part of fifteen years back.
Kitted out in casually smart sleeveless pinstripe shirt, Sean O'Hagan himself resembles an older Shaggy from 'Scooby Doo' with his sandy and tousled hair and scraggy beard, but he's very much the benign dictator and looks much more at ease with himself than back in the old days when he formed an unlikely alliance with every critic's favourite gob of vitriol, Cathal Coughlan, with the still under-rated Microdisney. Occasionally, too, he even throws in the kind of mid-paced simmer Microdisney excelled at when they were releasing fantastic stuff like "Loftholdingswood."
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Mostly, though, it's still summery West Coast harmonies, Brian Wilson-ish chord changes and Van Dyke Parks-style arrangements that float O'Hagan's boat, and while he confesses that "at least 20% of these songs relate to Peckham" (yes, as in Del Trotter), there's always a yearning pastorality on display and it's no surprise when O'Hagan sings "There should be some trees, there shold be some green" during "Calloway".
Highlights themselves are numerous, but top marks probably deserve to be awarded to "Calloway"s winning lilt, the banjo-tastic "Nomads" and the vivid, main-set closing "Tracks Go By": the one place where the band (almost) approach rocking out, in the same queasy way Tindersticks do, with everyone adding crucial accents and O'Hagan's Telecaster getting gleefully caught up in the song's circular, ringing refrain. Very nice indeed.
Of course it would be easy to condemn Sean O'Hagan for stubbornly refusing to desist from ploughing the same, '60s-influenced field he so proudly displays in public. Yet with an on-form High Llamas in tow he remains capable of instilling even a dismal evening such as this with his blissfully mellow magic. And maybe that's a commodity we should all have a little more quiet respect for, don't you think?
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