Monday 25 August 2014

Martin Stephenson & the Daintees at Glastonbury

Another extract from my my forthcoming Glasto book.

This little piece is the background to seeing Martin Stephenson & the Daintees at Glastonbury in 2013 & why I toddled along to the Acoustic Tent. 

It's just the background really, and may not make the final cut of the book, but for now here you go...



The first time I saw Martin Stephenson play live was back in the early 1980’s with his band The Daintees. 

They were supporting Prefab Sprout on their Steve McQueen album tour, so it must have been 1985-ish. Back then I went to a lot more gigs than I do, being, younger, single, having no kids or mortgage and therefore a bit of disposable income. On top of that, it was cheaper-much cheaper, even in relative terms- to see live music. If you paid more than a fiver for a gig then you’d expect something pretty damn special. As a rule of thumb, albums cost a fiver, so work it out. How often does a ticket for a gig cost less than the price of a CD nowadays? Anyway, having been to lots of gigs-at least one a week-I was pretty blasé and complacent regarding support acts. I think that I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times it was worth watching the support band, instead of turning up late enough just to catch the main act. 

We used to think that it was a sign of poor timekeeping and bad planning if we did actually see a support band. Ah, the sheer recklessness of youth! Nowadays on the odd occasion that I do venture out to see a band I expect my full money’s worth out of the whole experience; and that includes the support act as well. It’s that sort of “I’ve paid good money for this, so you better entertain me” attitude.  

So although we were really there for one of those rare things, a Prefab Sprout gig, we did actually see Martin Stephenson & The Daintees. I think they’d just released their first album, produced by Martin McAloon, of Prefab Sprout. We possibly made a positive decision to see them for that very reason. We were big Prefab Sprout fans. It was a good decision. For a support band they were very good and built up an instant rapport with the Liverpool audience; never an easy thing to do. It also helped that the album, “Boat to Bolivia”, was chock full of instant pop tunes. It still is, in my mind today, one of the great unsung debut albums of all time.

It was a few year later however, when I saw him play again, and that time it was a solo gig (no Daintees.) It was an unusual gig as well; not in some shitty club or one of the University venues or theatres in Liverpool, but at an art gallery. Granted, it was in a performance space upstairs in the gallery, but one that was more used to hosting “interpretative dance“ or some other such nonsense.

The layout was quite for the gig was quite odd. There must have been only a couple of hundred tickets sold. It was an all-seated show, but the seats were just those type of chairs you had in school (the ones that you could stack very high). There were arranged in an almost complete circle. It was like being at a school assembly. Martin Stephenson walked through the audience with his guitar and just started playing. There were no lights, no special effects, but it didn’t need anything. I recall he was accompanied by another chap, who I think played drums and piano. (Not at the same time, of course. That would have been worth paying a bit more to see.) Again he played a lot of songs from “Boat to Bolivia” and the follow-up albums, “Gladstone, Humour & Blue” and “Salutation Road”. All fine records, and as I say, full of tunes that you can’t really go wrong with.

What made the gig unique and one of the best live shows that I’ve seen wasn’t the fact of where it was, how good the songs were, the layout resembling some 6th form end of year show (although that all helped), it was Martin Stephenson’s performance itself.

I’ve seen some artists (but very few) who can get an audience’s attention and hold it in an instant. Beyonce springs to mind at this point as a prime example. Some artists-again not many-simply have that charisma that make you want to watch them, come what may. See Prince maybe, or Mark E Smith from The Fall.  But Martin Stephenson wasn’t like that. Not like Beyonce or Prince, and certainly not like Mark E Smith. I’m not saying he didn’t get our attention and if I said he didn’t have any charisma, then it paints him out as a bit of a boring twat. No. what he did at that gig is do something, or show something really, that I’ve never ever seen any artist do before or since.

He had supreme confidence. No, that’s not quite correct. He was confident, but not in an arrogant or showy way. It was that he was so relaxed with the whole thing. I couldn’t ever imagine him suffering from stage fright. It didn’t seem to be something that would cross his mind. (I may have been totally wrong of course, he may have been necking pint after pint just to build up his courage beforehand, but that’s the impression I got.) It was more than being self-assured, because I think that to demonstrate that quality you need to have worked on it a bit. I don’t think that self-assurance came into his range of thinking. He put on a show of course, but it wasn’t a showbiz show, if that makes sense.  And unlike any other performer I’ve seen, he was totally comfortable in what he was doing. There was nothing forced, nothing false.   

At one point he pulled up a spare chair and sat amongst us all, just chatting and singing. I recall- and it has stuck with me to this day- that he said that there is no point at all in being afraid of anything, of being worried about what others reactions may be, it all being just a waste of time.            

The whole thing was like a family get together and he was the simply the relative who could play a musical instrument. It wouldn’t have surprised me overly if his mother had appeared from a kitchen somewhere to tell us that the sausage rolls were ready and we’d better get them soon. He rambled on, played a few songs, asked what songs we wanted to hear, spoke about starting off in music when he was 18, the weather. Just chatting.  It was great.

So, with all this in mind, I just had to make my way to the acoustic tent. (I’m back at Glasto now. Sorry to have rambled on a bit, and gone off on a complete tangent, but I wanted to give a bit of context.)


My first book about Glastonbury, "Turn Left at the Womble; How a 48 year-old Dad survived his first time at Glastonbury"  is available here (both as a Kindle e book or a papaerback) : 
 
The follow-up "Left Again at the Womble; The Adventures of a Middle-Aged Dad working at the Glastonbury Festival" is here (again as a Kindle e book or paperback):



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