Tonight MARK WILSON gathered together a suitably rag-tag army of friends,family and fans at The View 2 Gallery, Mathew Street, to celebrate thelaunch of his debut album 'Play With Fire' (Slowburn Records).
The albumis a fine reflection of his live persona, blistering percussive blues mixed with a hybrid of English rock 'n' folk styles that call to mind thelikes of Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, Jimmy Page to name but three. The result is quite unique, eclectic, varied but with a sense of focus andalways hugely entertaining.
Amongst the friends tonight are the two support acts, SEAN BUTLER & THE NEON HEARTS and NANCY ELIZABETH CUNLIFFE each playing their own style of music, distinctive yet complimentary enough to guarantee a well balanced evening of acoustic music.
Smokin' Sean leads his Neon Hearts with drums but minus a second guitar that thins their sound somewhat but ultimately fails to reduce the impact of their excellent countrified songs that exhibit a rich vein of pop sensibility. The use of flute, as played by Kirsty Donaldson, adds a strange quality to their music - kinda taking the edge off their gruffness and encouraging them to float.
Nancy Cunliffe is a strange kettle of fish indeed, broadly 'northern' and slightly clumsy, she never-the-less creates a gossamer delicate veil of slightly sinister drones over which her ethereal voice rises and falls, sometimes bucking the notion of melody altogether in some of her free-form moments of vocal 'swooping'.
The songs tonight are created using either acoustic guitar, harp or kim (a stringed instrument from Thailand played with frail looking hammers). At times she's captivating but at others I find my mind a-wandering, finding the sheer oddness insufficient to hold my interest.
No such problem with tonight's main man Mark Wilson who's guitar style alone holds you riveted, trying to work out how he makes it sound the way he does. A one-man percussion unit, his hands - fingers, palms, thumbs - flail about the guitar's body tapping and thumping out a relentless, driving rhythm that takes his Mersey Delta blues to other shores, far stranger, much darker and more menacing. He plays most, if not all of the album and one is struck by just how varied the songs actually are.
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The blues songs are powerful whether hammering the notes from the fretboard('Play With Fire') or grinding them out with a bottleneck ('End Of The Line', 'Memories') . However it's the other songs, those constructed around a gentler style, that really shine and enable you to see the true quality of his songwriting. 'Lost' and 'Distant Sun' are built around the kind of open tunings that Jimmy Page used so effectively in his acoustic guitar work, the former being particularly reminiscent of Zep's 'Going To California'.
'Realise', tonight dedicated to his dad (who has part financed the album's recording), is a beautifully picked folk tune with subtle melody lines while 'Better Days' has a slightly jazzy feel performed brilliantly, notes 'popping' and his vocals holding on to the song's melody, far stronger live than on the album.
It seems each song has its own tuning and despite Mark claiming to be "more nervous than ever" he copes superbly well. Final song 'Finale' is a lullaby that draws great cheers and an unrecorded instrumental as encore - an unnecessary token, the real work is completed, job well done!
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