The Cowboy Junkies - Manchester Academy 9/10/2007

There’s a bar. Picture it - way off the main road, way out of town. A deep blue midnight sky, red neon lettering, a handful of worked-out trucks parked outside. Nobody looks up when you go in. The light’s too low. Men sitting alone for reasons they won’t share. Every customer there wants to be left alone. Then you hear it. That perfect sound flowing off the stage. The singer clutches the microphone stand close like a parting lover, too fragile to stand on her own in a place like this. The music exists only to provide waves on which her voice can float.

This is the sound of the Cowboy Junkies.

Twenty years ago, the Timmins family band spent a day in Trinity church, recording a mixed bag of covers and original songs, round a single microphone. Now, they have revisited the session with some other musicians and are playing the complete album live, as it was originally recorded.

I’m fairly confident tonight was the first time Academy 2 had featured a vase full of flowers on a table at its centre. I’m sure it’s the first time I’ve seen a roadie sneaking a kettle into the wings, presumably the source of the herbal tea Margo Timmins sipped from during the evening, perched on her stool.

Tea? Flowers? A Nice Sit Down? A night of cosiness and accepting your slide into middle age, surely? Not once the lights went down. At times the songs are ethereal - light, floating across the floor - but sometimes there’s a shift into a more sultry, sexual plane making you wish it was 3 a.m. and you were alone with a new flame in your arms.

Tonight was all about exquisite sound. A plexi-glass screen keeping the drums back, guitars held just on the edge, only released for as long as absolutely necessary and that glorious, misty voice right to the fore. Only when you have a room full of people sitting in silence, absorbing the music, each in their own world do you get a sense of the real power of a song. By the start of the second verse of “I’m so lonesome I could cry”, I was glad of the darkness, hiding the fact that this grown man had discovered how it felt to be that lonesome. I knew the pain that had driven Hank to put down those exact words to that exact melody. I knew why it all worked.

Then the song was over, the band smiled shyly and another began. Musicians have to be deceptively talented to play slowly and quietly without losing your attention. Getting someone as talented as Thea Gilmore to sing backing vocals is also quite an achievement.

Returning to the stage for an encore, Margo announced they were in trouble for “waking Thea’s baby”. Possibly the least rock ‘n’ roll start to a set ever?

After playing some songs from the new album and some old favourites not on the Trinity sessions (’Cheap is how I feel’ for one), it was over. The lobby has never seemed so noisy.

Comments

Leave a Reply