Great Lake Swimmers – Camden Jazz Cafe
A bleak, windy night in Camden. A middle-aged gentleman emerges onto the busy street from his flat and spies the queue for tonight’s show.
“Who’s playing then?”
“Great Lake Swimmers”, replies a lovable North London street urchin.
“The Greg Lake Singers?”
Now, Christmas is coming and there’s a small part of me that would have liked to have seen the Greg Lake Singers – no doubt performing ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’ 14 times (and then twice more for the encore), but tonight is all about Ontario’s favourite country-folkish sons, who are here to round off the UK leg of their European tour.
It’s a mixed crowd – slavering fans, bemused tourists expecting (not unreasonably) to hear some jazz in the Jazz Cafe, and what seems to be half of Toronto, judging by the a-whoopin’ an’ a-hollerin’ every time front man Tony Dekker mentions his home town.
First things first, support act Sleeping States make like a couple of Geography teachers from Bristol, all beard (him) and fuzzy jumper (her). They play some delicate tunes, adding live looped percussion and lengthy guitar effects. Any gig where the singer spends most of the gig hunched over his pedals, oscillators and transmogrifiers has the potential to lose your interest after a while, and this does, although I imagine they would be more engaging on record. Their MySpace seems to confirm this…
Great Lake Swimmers emerge in band uniform check shirts. Have no doubts, these guys get (p)laid every night.
The set is a mix of old favourites and tracks from this year’s gorgeous Lost Channels album. I had the very good fortune to pluck Lost Channels from the 6Music promo bin – a gigantic cardboard box big enough for Jon Holmes to live in, overflowing with discarded promo CDs sent by hopeful pluggers.
Quite how this record came to be cast aside like so many Mystery Jets singles is nothing short of a national scandal, and I feel very strongly that the Daily Mail should use this as the cornerstone of another of their bonkers campaigns against the BBC.
If you’re new to the GLS sound, expect lashings of banjo, mandolin and pedal steel, topped with Dekker’s ghostly vocals.
Here’s the utterly beautiful ‘She Comes To Me In Dreams’ from Lost Channels…
The live sound is rich and full thanks to Erik Arnesen’s splendid guitar and banjo work, the band is tighter than the 4-year old pair of ski pants I tried on last week, and Dekker is an engaging frontman who you sense is just delighted to be able to play these fragile songs for a rapt audience.
The band move on to France and Germany – check the dates here - before Dekker goes solo to support the interesting-sounding Jason Molina / Will Johnson tour. The band finish up touring the album with shows in Canada in late January/early February.
Below is a live acoustic version of Palmistry, but I’d urge you to rush headlong to their MySpace, where there is a whole bunch of stuff to wrap your ears around - the iTunes live version of Concrete Heart is a joy, and, for all you completist architecture fans, refers to Toronto’s CN Tower - until 2008 the world’s tallest self-supporting tower…
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