2005-05-25 - The 100 Club, London

On Stage :

Solo concert, with painting session.

Setlist : 

echo park
can't exist
a smile that explodes
straw dogs
leave us alone
all of our hands
mercedes
she paints me gold
blue lips
invisible hands
eyes on my back
honey and the moon

Recording :

This concert was officially recorded, and sold on CDr after the show.

Review :

Joseph Arthur - 100 Club, London
by Adam Sweeting
Fri 27 May 2005 11.44 BST

If you could take glittering reviews and celebrity admirers to the bank, Joseph Arthur would be a wealthy man. Such unlikely bedfellows as the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly hailed his fourth album, Our Shadows Will Remain, as one of the best of 2004, while Peter Gabriel, REM and Wilco have all given him a leg-up at various points along the way.

Despite all this, his career has been a struggle. While he was making the new album, Arthur didn't have a record deal and was shuffling nomadically between New York and New Orleans. Further accolades are likely to accrue when the album gets its UK release, but the prospect of Arthur suddenly becoming a household name looks remote. As this one-man performance showed, he's a driven, visionary character, powering through his songs with unsettling intensity. The fine art of schmoozing an audience is obviously the last thing on his mind, and he barely acknowledges his listeners. It is only when his battery of electronic gadgets suddenly packs up that he manages to blurt out: "How's it going, everybody?"

However, there's undeniable power in his music, especially when he cocoons himself in eerie harmonies, looped repeating phrases and dense washes of effects. He pairs off his baritone voice against a piercing falsetto, and rips out spasms of demented Neil Young-like lead guitar against a rich backdrop of chords. His songs can be disarmingly accessible and melodic, like Echo Park or Honey and the Moon, or they can lead you down winding passages where the darkness is split by lightning flashes of imagery: "I need Jesus to come back and die for me again". And it isn't every singer-songwriter who paints abstract portraits on a canvas at the back of the stage, daubing on thick dollops of red and blue and finishing it off with a spray-can, singing while he works. He might just be a genuine mad genius.