Tickets had been bought for this gig shortly after a fantastic show at Manchester's Academy 3 (aka The Hop & Grape), a show that was earthy and intimate, infused with nervous energy and featuring a MARTHA WAINWRIGHT who was in turns vulnerable and edgy or, proud and strident.
The original date was earlier in the year but was cancelled and re-arranged for tonight. Should we expect anything different from before? A few different songs perhaps, a different musician or two, maybe a more confident Martha?
Whatever I expected it wasn't what I got. The band was essentially the same but with the addition of an attention grabbing keyboard player and a fairly ineffective backing singer (Martha's cousin) - additions that somehow immediately diluted the rawness of the earlier band. But despite this things started well enough with a fairly prolonged band set featuring the best of the album 'Factory', 'These Flowers', 'Ball And Chain' and 'This Life' all included.
Problems, for me at least, began when the band left the stage and Martha was left on her own. Armed only with an acoustic guitar - upon which she frequently played the wrong chords - and her attempts at humour she resorted to a stop start bout of audience participation that covered (ie ruined) at least two songs. The first to suffer was a new song on which she insisted that the audience warbled in the way that is practiced by certain arabian desert tribes - sadly large portions of said audience obliged, badly.
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Secondly it was the turn of Leonard Cohen's 'Tower Of Song', a song she'd handled masterfully at the earlier gig but tonight decided to bring an extremely embarrassed member of the audience up to provide backing vocals - between all the messing about she then managed to twice forget the lyrics, stopping to recall them before continuing. Now I know I'm going to sound to some like an archetypal 'grumpy old man', and some who were present no doubt found it endearing and charming but the sad fact is that the momentum of the set never recovered, time had been wasted that failed to consider the venue's curfew and the show merely petered out, leaving many dissatisfied at the end. Disappointing.
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