Southern Fried
Loudon Wainwright III & Beth Nielsen Chapman
Perth Concert Hall
Rob Adams
three stars
IF Stevie Wonder hadn’t already claimed it, Songs in the Key of Life would have been a good title for Saturday’s concert. Channelling the human experience is the songwriter’s default position but it seemed particularly operative here.
Beth Nielsen Chapman has drawn on her own illnesses and that of her late husband, and more recently a bumpy patch in her second marriage, to create anthems whose easiness on the ear belie the situations behind them. Accompanying herself on guitar and – on one song – piano and working with the sweet backing vocals, bass guitar, keyboard and percussion of her assistant, Ruth Trimble, she delivered fans favourites Sand and Water and the bouncier This Kiss as well as introducing newer material including the jolly, contented opener, Enough for Me.
Loudon Wainwright III is approaching the fiftieth anniversary of his first album with an entertaining, curmudgeonly relish for the job that sustains him into his seventies. He’s at the death and decay stage of his songwriting career, and sitting down due to plastic surgery to his posterior but metaphorically standing tall as he sings in defence of those considered old and grey and in the way.
With long term associates, singer-banjoist Chaim Tannenbaum and David Mansfield on fiddle, mandolin and guitar, making up a string band, Wainwright read an amusingly touching chapter from his forthcoming book and included an Americanised Hermless in tribute to Michael Marra, who would have been chuffed to find his song included alongside Tom Lehrer and Marty Robbins songs in a set that pitched oldies such as Dead Skunk and Swimming Song in with Wainwright’s latest work.
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