Tom Baxter Live @ The Amadeus | livemusic.fm

This has got to be one of the strangest gigs I've ever been to ... I'd 'discovered' Tom Baxter while I'd been living in New Zealand and found it highly ironic that he was brought to my attention while living 12,000 miles away from my old haunts in Balham (namely the Bedford Arms that had been my local when I lived in South London and where Tom Baxter cut his teeth ...) Strange that, when you get to know and like an artist in another hemisphere when you managed to miss them when you lived round the corner. A friend of mine (who I'd introduced to Baxter's 2006 Album Feather & Stone) had seen Tom Baxter play a stonking gig at the legendary Whelan's in Dublin and I was mighty jealous.

So the first chance I got, when back in Blighty, I trundled along to this west London mecca to catch TB live. As is my custom I dragged along my flatmate, and it was only as I approached the doric columns of this former Welsh Presbyterian Church that I started to get the fear ... oh shit there were seats and tables with table cloths, and fuck me, there were bean-bags at the front and little tea-lights on the tables! Oh no oh no - Tom Baxter has turned into some kind of middle-class hippy, a fact that was re-enforced by the middle-class, artsy trustafarians trickling into the joint. Heading to the bar (a cloth covered table with bottles of wine and beers in a bucket of ice) I found that for licensing reasons, you had to buy beer tokens in the cloak-room. My flatmate gave me 'the look' ... what made it worse was that three more friends were coming! Luckily one was the friend who'd seen Tom Baxter in Dublin - so was likely to be more open to the general oddity of the place ... but the other two were not going to be happy about being dragged across London I thought!

The evening kicked off (mercifully with just myself and my flatmate) - a fella called the Ventriloquist, who has successfully raised the art of performance poet back from the dead. As a bunch of the West London Arts crowd relaxed back onto their bean bags, he sprung forth into the most absurd, psychedelic, rhyming couplet monologue regarding a cup of tea and an out of body experience. It was just what I needed and felt vindicated that although the evening was gonna be different it was prolly gonna be one to remember!

I missed most of Sam Semple's set while guiding my friends to the venue via mobile telephony. Sam has co-written some of Tom's more recent tracks (as has Judie Tzuke). Sam had the hard job of being the first musical performer to a half-empty hall where the clink of bottled beers being rattled in their buckets was in danger of drowning him out at times!

The Portico Quartet - some new age jazz/tribal musicians - were completely in tune with the surroundings and despite the oddest instrument I've ever seen or heard (the 'hang') being at the heart of most of the melodies, the music was entertaining and inclusive. It kind of felt that you'd been invited round to someone's West London living room, handed a highly organic ethically grown spliff and a glass of non-GM vineyard sourced wine. It was a bit better than that, but I couldn't shake the weirdness of the whole place.

During the next break the crowd swelled considerably, the bean bags were swept aside as were most of the chairs and it began to feel more like a proper gig. The Ventriloquist - now in MC mode - announced the gig was being recorded and that the little pre-printed CD pouches could be digitally filled by downloading the songs from Tom's website and cut to CD in two weeks time. Not a bad idea. The band appeared, and the most stereotypical of the trustafarian audience (a guy in tweeds, fishing hat and bleached blonde dreadlocks) appeared as the bass player. The strings section occupied stage left and a slow groove started up. Tom Baxter swaggered and went straight into a new number 'On A Night Like This' - which got the crowd swaying and behaving a bit more like people normally do at gigs. Building on the warm reception of the opening number ( the band had played three times already that week at the Amadeus) Tom's set consisted of mostly new numbers; some more singer-songwriter numbers similar to his earlier work and some more daring latino-rhythm pieces such as 'Icarus Wings' and 'Skybound', which had been influenced by a recent trip to South America. I have to say I preferred the Latino stuff to the slightly indulgent newer numbers, but songs such as 'Better' and 'Too far Gone' showed Tom at his vocal and song-writing best. For me the let down of the gig was that he seemed determined to play as few of his older numbers as possible, jettisoning them in favour of the newer numbers. The only tracks from Feather & Stone were 'Almost There' (which is not one of my faves) and the customery finale of 'Don't Let Go'. The finale was intense, passionate and climactic; the strings had finally warmed up and risen to the occasion, and depsite a slight tendency to sound a bit like a piece from Riverdance at one point, it was a great number to end the gig on and really shook the Welsh Chapel to it's foundations. Tom Baxter is undoubtedly a great live performer and one of this country's foremost folk-acoustic singer-songwriters. It was still a fucken weird gig - but I'm glad I caught it!