This was Sturgill Simpson's first ever London show on his first European tour to promote the European issue of his High Top Mountain album by Loose Music online and he managed to pretty much sell out The Slaughtered Lamb. Certainly by the time I arrived (just after The Treetop Flyers had finished playing) all the seats had gone.
Soon Enough, Sturgill came on and as befits a country singer from Kentucky he sat down beneath the venue's Pentagram sign to play a totally acoustic guitar into a microphone and sing to us about Foggy Old London. I would have mocked him a tad for this if I didn't wake up the next morning to a nice, if not too dense fog that he helped to conjure up in his high plains country picking style.
He thanked us all effusively for showing up and he was genuinely surprised to see a packed and attentive audience as he sang about living his dream and how he was Tired Of Cold Places. His voice grew on me quite quickly as he sounds like he has lived a good bit of life. His anecdotes between songs certainly made us happy; he had survived his hard living youth so he could come and sing about how he Loved Me One More Time.
Water In A Well from the High Top Mountain album had more passion in the solo performance than with his band on the CD but it might have been due to being up close and that it had a bit more of a bluesy feel to it live. Then he showed us one of his major influences with a nice version of Roy Orbison's Crying. It verged on sounding like he wanted to break into a yodel but thankfully resisted the temptation.
The End Of That Long White Line was about a road trip and not a drug trip and it certainly reminded me of what it's like towards the end of a good long drive when you're struggling to stay awake and concentrate. He went out of his way to play all the London songs he learnt back in Kentucky and I Wish I Was In London went down very well in this part of city where the Romans had fought so hard to control: so much so that if you cross to the other side of the River Fleet you find the Italian church.
Life Ain't Fair And The World Is Mean - the lead track on the album - was up next and had a good little tale before it and well I think we all know where he's coming from on this one. certainly one or two people already knew the words to sing along to it. You Can Have The Crown is a nicely humble little song that wouldn't be out of place on an Alan Lomax compilation.
He dedicated I'd Have To Be Crazy to Steve Fromholz who apparently died last year. I'm afraid I'd never heard of him so have no idea how good a version this was, but I did really enjoy it. He then got all wistful on Sitting Here Without You. I took a guess that the next song was called Promise You and was (from the sound of it) an attempt to get back the woman that left in the previous song; thankfully without getting too maudlin about it either. Even though he was certainly still feeling Lonesome while he was in a packed pub basement.
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He then paid tribute to George Jones by playing one of George's songs that is guaranteed to make my skin crawl and head for the volume button to turn it down or off. Yes, sadly he took on A Good Year For The Roses - the sort of Country tune that makes a city boy like me just cringe at the lyrics. That said, he pulled it off by not being at all mawkish about it. He followed that with a good go at Willie Nelson's Sad Songs and Waltzes: now that was much more like it.
He was now starting to wrap things up and thank us all for showing up some more before playing the excellent Railroad Of Sin. It seemed perfect beneath that pentagram and less than a quarter Mile from where the Victorians constructed the largest underground Railway junction in the world even if the full scheme won't be finished until cross rail opens in a few years time. He then closed with Some Days, dedicating it to his wife.
It didn't take too much to get Sturgill back for an encore and he opened with Waylon Jennings' Long Time Gone: a song he certainly took less liberties with than Tom Jones did. It was a corking version and that only left time for one more tune off of High Top Mountain - the right on and righteous Old King Coal which both mourns the loss of the coal industry and remembers how much many of the miners suffered.
The rest of his UK tour dates can be found here:
Sturgill Simpson online Sturgill Simpson online. He certainly lives up to the high praise he's been getting and is well worth seeing live.
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