Live Review

Ben Weaver – Green Note, Camden

• 15th Feb 2011

I think the venue needs to be talked about at length. Why? Is this like one of those Guardian food reviews where the pompous writer spends hours talking about how he was feeling that day and how he travelled to the venue? Well, if you are asking, I got the 29 from Euston and was up for a low key gig with a nice atmosphere, and that is what I got.

Green Note is a nice little place in Camden that does the job it wants to by trying to recreate 1960s New York where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez might pop up and perform an impromptu number whilst the audience furiously puff away on special cigarettes. It’s 2011 now, and Bob Dylan is still croaking along at big arena shows and anyone who wants a cigarette better clear off outside and keep the regulation distance from the door, thank you very much! But Green Note is no mere imitator, but offers a ramshackle, hotchpotch venue that is concealed away from the prying eyes of Camden behind an old red theatre curtain when the show begins. An odd, yet well received suggestion came from the compere who recommended that we all keep schtum and put our phones on silent while the gig was on. Any iPhone-wielding maniacs beware – you’re constant updates on pop culture are not welcome here!

The gig began with an unkempt guy wandering on stage and picking up his guitar whilst the audience sat with an almost GP-surgery like hush. Ben Weaver is a singer and expert guitarist from Minneapolis who stood up on stage and didn’t stop save to sup at his beer and retune his guitar, with the occasional anecdote with a voice that sounded like some of Neil Young’s socially awkward yet tender ramblings from the early ‘70s live albums. His songs are vaguely reminiscent of Iron and Wine, but are more mournful and classically folky (a bit like some John Martyn songs), with some of the most effortlessly brilliant finger picked guitar I have seen. Throughout the gig he stood facing the crowd with his eyes closed – but don’t be too offended by him not wanting to see you, the intimacy of the venue would have been suffocating if he were to peer out at the judgementally – and delivered songs with a genuine sorrowful air and imagery in the lyrics that were crafted beautifully with ingenuity and clarity. His song ‘Grass Doe’ had vivid lines with skilful guitar, ‘The rain came down like watermelon seeds’, a line I was a bit of a fan of. This was the sort of gig where you could hear the every word of the lyrics, close textual analysis a necessity -they were not obscured in anyway. I’m glad I haven’t studied linguistics otherwise this review could have dulled more people’s senses than it has done already.

Occasionally picking up the banjo and performing a plucked number, he created a mood of contemplative silence mixed with a mild uncomfortability at some of the content of the songs. ‘Being careful with your heart didn’t stop the pain in the end’ was a particularly sobering line that the crowd could not help but be involved in. But it didn’t leave you with wanting to well up and ring past girlfriends too much, as musically it enchanted with perfectly played melodics and a deep bluesy voice. Throughout the guitar was incredible, and go and see him for that. The songs that were good were very good, and the songs that felt like album filler still had excellent fingered guitar, though the imagery was perplexing and the singing a little generic and obvious.