with: Adrian Crowley / Candy Thief / Player Piano / Deaf Mutes
The railway station for Glenrothes is at Thornton, and if people with cars who should be meeting people at stations were more aware of this, there would be a lot less lateness in and around central Fife, and I would have caught Deaf Mutes’ entire opening set at The Fence Collective’s four night annexe to the Pittenweem Arts Festival. As it was only the last song had the chance to charm. It took it with urgency, greeting us with desperate finger picked guitar scrambling over chords, pursued by a repeated howling vocal. Yet in true Fence style all this was delivered with a vulnerability and delicateness that made us rue our lack of punctuality. We fired our worst dead-eyes at our non-Fife circle literate driver, and settled ourselves to await the next act.
The venue was Pittenweem New Town Hall, a scout hut of a building, decked out in fairy lights, and spangled with candles on church hall trestle tables. Two openings at the back revealed a makeshift record shop and what was essentially a licensed tuck shop. All of this was very Fence, such stylistic colloquialisms having become their market identity (if such a notion can apply to the neo-folk collective).
As if to contradict this picture of small town isolation, the sleepy American croon of Player Piano (alias Jeremy Radway) promptly oozed through the room, depositing a varied collection of musical flotsam on the varied collection of jetsam that was the audience. His voice, one part Casablancas one part Stigers, was accompanied by an improbable computer geek body awkwardly covered with crumpled shirt and trousers. This may be due to a lack of travelling mercies on his journey from London that morning, but it didn’t interfere with his weary, wonky ballads and intimate, mirthful lyrics. All in all, really rather good, and followed by Candythief, flying the flag for oestrogen, and sounding something like a less weird, less-stringed Joanna Newsom. Distinctly the most upbeat of the acts, she was joined by the aforementioned Player Piano for half her set, proving the infectiousness of Fence’s musical incest.
Finally Adrian Crowley took to the stage, prefacing his set with enough Irish charm to make sure everyone had already decided they liked him. He brought the first few songs alone, allowing the quiet surrounding his finger picked semi-acoustic to grip the audience. One by one his band joined him throughout the set, and by the end you could even say they were loud. James Yorkston’s appearance for one song was entirely appropriate, the two being sonic blood brothers. Crowley’s songs are hung with the same images of nature and the sea, and of precious emotional happenings amid self-doubt and world weariness. If that doesn’t sound like a night on the tiles, Crowley doesn’t care. He told us of a friend who suggested he write a song about a party, rather than his usual ‘`sad’` songs. Crowley did so, and named the song ‘`leaving the party’` ‘` now that’s devotion to melancholy for you. With Crowley, as with Yorkston, the music is like the harr ‘` enveloping, insistently calming, yet unusual, personal and surprising. The final song rose to a hair-raising crescendo of guitar and strings, sending us out into the sea wind feeling like we’d just been buffeted by it, and thanking the Fence Collective for refusing to move away from their Fife neuk. Some music sounds better there.