Hamish Hawk & Villagers cast a spell: A mesmerising midweek evening at Wylam Brewery
“I usually have a full band with me,” Hamish Hawk announces in a Wylam Brewery so hushed you could hear an ant drop a pin on a cotton wool pad and its muttered apology for momentarily breaking the auspicious aura. He continued to address the awed audience, “So, I usually run around and glare out like this,” he said, miming a crooked, enthralled stare. He was half right.
Although the band and the high energy may have been absent, the glaring remained. In fact, throughout exactly half of the set, I felt as though he was glaring right at me. Not in a spiritual sense, either. As in literally staring at me the way a duck would stare at a Hovis factory should they ever locate one near a municipal pond. For someone like myself, who is touch-and-go with eye contact, this made for quite an intense welcome to the double-headed show.
When forced to divert my glare to break the periodic 15 seconds of interlocked pupils, the focus of my attention switched to Hawk’s enunciated lyrics. Thanks, in part, to the stripped-back nature of his acoustic set and the fact I already knew the words from his stellar studio releases to date, the brilliance of his writing became all the more pronounced.
Often, at live shows, you can’t make out the words at all. That’s a crying shame. Because, after all, how can you be the slightest bit romantic and not be moved by the notion of someone attending a show early, unaware of the support act, and hearing the lyric: “I remember when cancer was just a constellation, a starry-eyed crustacean with nothing to say of whether you and I live or die.”
That same sentiment of carefully considering the words and emotions behind the songs spilt over to Villagers’ headline set. Wylam Brewery can be a daunting space. The building is the last art deco stronghold remaining from when the 1929 World’s Fair was held in Newcastle to celebrate local industry as the Great Depression arose. At the time, it was dubbed ‘The Palace of Arts’ and was constructed with a conical ceiling to imbue the works displayed with an added sense of prowess. But for artists now, it’s like performing inside a dropped ice cream cone that never quite had music in mind. That can dwarf those less confident and assured than Conor J. O’Brien.
Over the years, O’Brien has established himself as not only one of the finest vocalists in modern alternative music but also one of its most seamless songwriters—so seamless, in fact, that he was able to tinker with the composition of some of the band’s biggest hits throughout the set and nobody batted an eyelash. As it happens, in these experimental moments, the band were often able to hit upon euphoric exultancy that propelled the shushed crowd towards a more vigorous sway. During ‘Pieces’, O’Brien himself turned towards howling in ecstatic derangement.
Fleeting moments like this amid sweet pleasantry defined the whole gig. Jazz flourishes and the odd strobe light bouncing off a disco ball allowed for billows of rapture that were always sustained by the simple class of the songwriting on display, never less than sweet in the quieter moments. Superb vocals, a drummer with perhaps the finest tempo and volume control I’ve witnessed this year, and Wylam’s own carefully engineered sound ensured the class was there to allow O’Brien to artfully bring impassioned Duende to the band’s set.
Ultimately, in its own humble, refined, and dignified way, it might not have seared itself onto the psyche of the sell-out crowd as something indescribably sublime, but for a honeyed Wednesday night, it was as good as live music gets. And that’s saying something.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.