The temperature rises as audience packs out Tooth & Claw when BC Camplight stops by
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REVIEW:
BC Camplight
Tooth & Claw
5 stars
If you are going to have a first encounter with the genius that would be BC Camplight, make it like the one our packed crowd had in the Tooth & Claw last Friday.
Just as gig start time rolled round and you wondered if he might be lying hiding behind the upright piano onstage, he wandered through the crowd in a leather cowboy-style hat with a bottle of Jack Daniels swinging from his hand – and his banter motor already running.
“This is cosy!” he said looking straight back into the eyes of the front row two feet away! I had this idea to do a tour of small places, so far it’s been a sh** show. Lost my wallet in Worcester and almost knocked myself unconscious again today. The door was just this high. Anybody bought the album? I can’t believe how close you all are. You’ve done nothing wrong and I want to call security!”
The album is The Last Rotation Of Earth which has been making a stir since it came out last month and the promotional tour has B ‘Brian Christinzio’ C Camplight stopping off at small venues solo just picking up a piano or keyboard for the night before moving on. It sounds as if it could be terrifying/exhilarating and certainly you could fuel a small country off the energy he radiated into the Inverness venue.
And he makes a promise.
“There are a lot of Michelin star f***in’ tunes … and we will do it together!” BC finishes his rousing mission statement.
He sings the first line of I Want To Be In The Mafia.
“Yeah!” a long drawled out groan of deep satisfaction from one guy floats across the silence.
“Thanks pal!” BC says sarcastically.
And we all erupt.
If that wasn’t a pretty great start there was perhaps one of the finest rhymes in modern songwriting coming up – “… outside a chip shop in Oldham … we’ll play Texas hold-em”.
There’s a lot to take in in a BC song: the dial can wobble from super-ironic to heartbreakingly sincere, piano plonking along at top volume in a cockney knees-up style falls to barely heard gentleness, and his voice goes falsetto high to the rumbling bassy growl of Going Out On A Low Note’s final note.
The songs from the new album – reconstructed mid-creation after a break-up – were nestled in a pocket mid-set, heartbreakers that breathe the life of the musician in front of you with all his contrary, fragile, bombastic quirks. And then there’s the killer stand up set he weaves in between the songs: “Since 2005 I’ve been trying to impress my mum and it hasn’t really worked at all. My new record went to the top 10 – now I got her. Great stuff, pretty impressive! She sent me back a text – ‘The dog’s dead’.”
And when someone greets his Jack Daniels’ gulping with “Get some real whisky!”, is it coincidence that he decides that’s the time to say he is introducing his special guest – “Guy Garvey!”
The audience properly gasped to hear the Elbow singer’s name, then realised it was BC’s little joke. But he made it better with the sublime Kicking Up A Fuss, having the grace to be a bit embarrassed about how popular it is: “This is so much on 6 Music right now. Thank you, but come on, that’s enough isn’t it?”
Introducing Going Out On A Low Note, BC says: “It’s from the third last album. I think it’s wonderful. I do a lot of self-congratulating.”
Though he admits that, it’s only small beer next to the sense of self-criticism and depression which lives in his songs and adds some of their darkness.
After the last of the songs from the new album, the title track, BC kids us again: “So sorry for playing so many sad songs … I don’t like it when my audience feels good!”
But the truth is it’s impossible not to. The next song, I’m Alright In The World, he sang parts of it in the high pure voice of a choirboy, and there was no chance he could hear the front row breathing now, in the pindrop silence he had created.
With his occasional taste for cheese – the references in the songs to everything from Dickinson’s Real Deal to Die Hard and Ace Of Base – maybe it’s no surprise he was “going for the sh*t option and doing a medley” to pack a few more songs in. This time, he started weaving in “Happy Birthday Andy” for a birthday guy in the audience, picking special moments.
“I have to admit I’m desperate – Happy Birthday Andy,” he slots in as we snigger, in medley song I’m Desperate.
The end of the set approaches, you can feel it as the jokes ramp up. He can feel it too.
“I don’t do encores, cos I’m not a … douchebag!”
“I feel as if I’ve had sex with the first four rows!” he says as we are so, so close. And yes, Atom Bomb takes us there.
