A very welcome return to Bromborough for Ewen (see last year's report here) and he was given the whole second half to entertain us. Ewen only plays his own stuff, and his opener was "Old Dog" - a bluesy number which is all based on one riff repeated many times. In "Mr Anderson" Ewen proved his writing talents by managing to rhyme "great war" and "snore", and played in something of a Mark Knopfler style with a nice delicate touch. His voice, mellow now, but retaining his North Eastern accent at times was pushed to something more hoarse in "Hey Katrina", Ewen's hurricane piece and his guitar style seems to involve wrestling the sound out of the instrument at times, not quite with the venom Neil Young would use, but there was some major effort put into the sound.
"Love Birds" and "One More Story" followed and then, after an explanation that this is about Joni Mitchell, Ewen played "In Your Studio" and there was a very definite gear change, both in lyrical and musical content, a much richer sound which made us sit up and pay even more attention.
Ewen calls himself an easy listening folk artist and many of his songs fall into this category, but his lyrics can be quite deep and deserve to be heard - for example in "Lonely Little White Cloud":
"California living's great,
Until you start to shake"
Marvelous!
Winding up with his well known "Rubenstein Remembers" (as recorded by Allan Taylor) which had everybody going, Ewen was well received and so long as he keeps returning to England, he will be welcome back at Bromborough.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment