Rock lore tends to celebrate the achievements of its' own purely in terms of the big, stadium-sized successes. Indeed, you don't have to do much digging to find well-documented accounts of Oasis at Knebworth, Led Zeppelin at Earl's Court, The Beatles at Shea Stadium ad infinitum, do you?
Rhetorical question, of course, and good luck to the reporters and photographers who've been jostling ringside at such mammoth affairs. However, it's just as often the less-celebrated media circuses and small club soirees that impinge on the discerning punter's memory and quietly - as the old cliche goes - change your life too.
Take this writer's own experience, for example. Last year, arguably the finest show he was fortunate enough to catch was a sparsely-attended affair at a small upstairs folk club in Cork featuring a still-relatively obscure cult trio called CLAYHILL. The band were yet to release their critically-acclaimed first album proper "Small Circle" at the time, and your correspondent had gone along on the strength of the band's debut mini-album "Cuban Green".
The night itself was a sparse, acoustic affair, as the logistics of touring with the drums, strings and additional musicians colouring Clayhill's on-record sound were beyond the band's pocket at the time. Thus, we were presented with Clayhill's core trio of Ted Barnes (acoustic guitar), double bassist Ali Friend and vocalist Gavin Clark, who looked especially nervous as he lurked in the shadows clutching a carrier bag.
To the uninitiated, it didn't make like the recipe for a great gig, but - as that other dependable cliche goes - appearances can indeed be deceptive. During their generous hour on stage, Clayhill were utterly marvellous: emotive, rustic, folksy and stripped bare to raw emotion, with Gavin Clark's honey and gravel voice as otherworldly a vessel as this writer had ever heard. When we finally left the building, those of us making up that small audience instinctively knew we'd been privy to something very special indeed: something everyone else had missed out on that night.
It was clearly a feeling Clayhill themselves shared, for - after completing their tour to promote debut album "Small Circle" - their core trio made their way into the studio with front of house engineer John McCormack and proceeded to lay down the eight tracks making up this low-key "Acoustic LP." The band themselves describe it simply as a "seaside souvenir." Well, it sure pisses on a stick of rock, I can tell you right now.
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Featuring a set similar to the one your reviewer caught that night, "Acoustic LP" mixes and matches a selection of tracks from both "Cuban Green" and "Small Circle" with two new tracks and one cheeky cover. Familiarity doesn't faze the album tracks one iota, and the fragile gravitas of mysterious beauties such as "Figure Of Eight" ("watching you move is like watching a bird unfold" - still one of this writer's favourite ever lyrics), "Face Of The Sun" and "Mystery Train" is merely heightened by the sparseness of the arrangements.
It's not all downbeat, of course, and even without the trip-hoppy syncopation of Tim Weller's drums, both "Northern Soul" and the playfully anthemic tale of a scissor-toting Cuban gardener in "Grasscutter" sound funkily anthemic, with Barnes and Friend really shining on the instrumental outro of the former.
Of the two new tracks, "Funny How" is framed by Ted Barnes' patiently descriptive guitar, an aching, rising chorus and a hauntingly chromatic final coda, while "Disscordents" is a valedictory, there-by-the-grace affair and even the actually quite lovely cover of The Smiths' "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" sneaks past the scorers without too many furrowed brows.
"Acoustic LP", then, may be an unassumingly low-key affair, but don't let the lack of the roar of a crowd and scarf-waving choruses fool you into thinking it isn't a document of a band burning brightly from its' emotional core. This is a quiet classic and an essential companion to Clayhill's magnificent studio work. Absolutely sublime.
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