Festival Music

Alexi Murdoch

The Hub

Rob Adams

ONE STAR

Six or seven items into his set Alexi Murdoch began playing guitar and singing then stopped. “Am I in the wrong key?” he asked his band, owning up to a moment of paranoia. It turns out he was in the right key but the dissonance that possibly would have resulted had he carried on might have introduced something more interesting than what had come before and what came after.

Indeed, were it not for documented evidence of Murdoch’s career dating back a decade or so, this Hub session would have seemed like the result of an elaborate hoax. There’s a romantic element in Murdoch’s story of being the independent artist who fights shy of the music industry but whose music reaches a wide audience through its use in films and TV commercials. This can be lucrative, so good on him.

Where things veer into fantasy, however, is that – according to the programme note – Murdoch feels “almost part of a tradition” that includes Nick Drake, Richard Thompson and John Martyn. Not on this evidence, he’s not. This was a series of monochrome washes into which Murdoch droned folksy doggerel in some imagined facsimile of a Scottish folk singer’s voice while picking a basic guitar pattern.

His band included Scottish jazz trumpeter Colin Steele, doing what sounded like warm-up exercise long notes, and pianist Phil Alexander rippling away with quite some patience alongside trombone, bass and drums. At one point Murdoch sat on the floor and droned to a harmonium, at another he delivered a sliver of a song at the piano and said it was serious. So now we know.

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