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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