The last time I heard a crowd roar like this before a musician had played a note, the newly reunited Pixies were taking the stage. Billy Strings is a secret phenomenon in the UK when compared to his arena-filling US status as the biggest bluegrass act in decades. In the Royal Albert Hall, though, fans ranging from an earmuffed babe in arms to grizzled Deadheads treat the guitarist like a hallowed great.
There’s more standing, drinking and dancing than I’ve ever seen at a UK Americana show. The bona fides of playing with Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann, recording with Willie Nelson and Dylan’s rare invitation to guest on “All Along The Watchtower” (at a summer Outlaw Festival show) doubtless help, while expansive soloing and group interplay also place him in the stylistic neighbourhood of jam bands and “Dark Star”.
Billy is a humble, boyish 33-year-old, without the charisma of an obvious star, except when his guitar speaks for him. He was raised himself from a family background of addiction, abuse and ingrained self-destruction which began with his dad’s fatal heroin overdose when Billy was only two. “Somewhere in there, I believe I’m a white-trash piece of shit that should be withering away,” he has said.
Such shaky self-belief and shadowy memories are reflected in the rueful subject matter of many of the songs he plays tonight. He was saved by a love of playing bluegrass as well as he possibly can, which is an article of faith as much as a musical calling. Now it has brought him from his former Michigan trailer home to the Victorian splendour of the Albert Hall. “I truly cannot believe I’m standing here seeing this,” he says, pausing to take it in. “It just feels like a special night.”
He begins with a brace of songs seeking solace in the natural world. “The stars don’t fade, they look brand-new,” he sings wistfully on “Red Daisy”. “I’ll sing along with the birds, if I only knew the words,” he adds on “Gild The Lily”, a wish made in a sorrowful and softening voice on his last pass at it. Effects pedals give the acoustic band’s breakneck soloing an abrasive rock edge, while Strings’ long hair blows in artificial wind. His “favourite song that I’ve written”, “Dust In A Baggie”, tells a cautionary tale of meths and jail, the kind of theme which has taken Strings beyond bluegrass orthodoxy into the modern ills of its American heartland. Heedless hyper-speed picking anyway overtakes the lyric, in a show initially all about careening musicianship.
Doc Watson’s version of Jerry Douglas’s apposite “Leaving London” is one of several covers tracing Strings’ wide American hinterland. Learned from his musician stepdad’s record collection, it reflects on the troubadour life. His own delicate song of romantic devotion, “Show Me The Rose”, slows the pace during his mellow, chiming duet with Jarrod Walker’s mandolin, before “Dawg’s Rag” picks up downhill velocity which is complicated by Alex Hargreaves’ fiddle as its cuts and saws.
“Away From The Mire” is a Strings redemption song steeped in humility which sees the band break down into a floating, dreamy space. He follows it with a solo a cappella take on the Charles Wesley hymn “I Was Born To Die”, losing himself in the spooked old corners of the song’s “world unknown”. There is room, too, for Eddie Noack’s “Psycho”, a modern murder ballad which flits disconcertingly in and out of reality, the distorted psychedelia and fluttering mandolin of “Hide And Seek”, and “Nights In White Satin” reimagined as a country waltz.
“Escanada”, written with sunny memories of male bonding in the Michigan backwoods in mind, has a sourer tone as the band interweave, dissolve and reconstitute. If Strings’ true Dead inheritance is in Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass grounding, spacy, expanding jams are touched on too.
The roar at the end is more deafening still. The band are singing about Davy Crockett by then, ancient and modern American country meeting in their close harmonies.
SET 1
1 Red Daisy
2 Gild The Lily
3 Hellbender
4 Dust In A Baggie
5 Leaving London
6 Show Me The Door
7 Dawg’s Rag
8 Stratosphere Blues/I Believe In You
9 In The Clear
10 Turmoil & Tinfoil
SET 2
11 The Fire On My Tongue
12 Ole Slew-Foot
13 Age
14 My Alice
15 Away From The Mire
16 Am I Born To Die?
17 Brown’s Ferry Blues
18 Dos Banjos
19 Escanaba
20 Nights In White Satin
21 Pretty Daughter
22 Psycho
23 Hide And Seek
24 Richard Petty
25 Tennessee
The post Billy Strings: bluegrass star shines at the Royal Albert Hall appeared first on UNCUT.
