Annie & the Caldwells are a long-running family gospel ensemble from West Point, Mississippi – father and sons playing guitar, bass and drums, mother and daughters singing. The chaps offer a sinewy, stripped-down funk redolent of the late 1970s: dad, Willie J. Caldwell Sr, is a fantastic guitarist, and mother and daughters tear the roof off the place. They came to attention when David Byrne put out a record on his Luaka Bop label, and suddenly they were no longer just a local gospel group.
Except they are. In an early show at Ronnie Scott’s, Annie – seated centre-stage in what looked like a black leather housecoat – was there to save souls. She refused to be discouraged by only three hands rising when she asked who believed in Jesus. She demanded a couple of middle-aged women come to the front and clutch her hand and accept the Lord. Her daughters went around forcing people to testify.
The contrast between the awkwardness of the audience and the insistence of the band was deliciously comical – for those on both sides of the stage – and uncomfortable. Annie & the Caldwells are preachers who happen to entertain, not entertainers who happen to preach. The audience, on the other hand, were there solely to be entertained; the preaching was merely part of the entertainment. It was, in a sense, the performance of religion, which made all of us in the audience into cultural tourists. Oh, but what a place to see a band so taut and performances so demonstrative. I wish we could have just one rock’n’roll club that was half so civilised.
The Scala is not so civilised: it’s a warren. But if you have been there enough, you can find the stairway that leads to a balcony that provides a perfect view of stage and audience. The crowd was three quarters twentysomethings, and a quarter people my age. To the young, Westside Cowboy is buzzy new music; to the old it reminds us of what we were listening to when we were 20. For this Manchester quartet have that early-1990s alt-rock slacker sound down pat.
That’s not a complaint: rock music rolls in cycles, and for a few years now the US indie of my own youth seems to have become a form of classic rock for a lot of younger musicians. So when the Wahs opened with a guitar pattern so familiar that Frank Black might be writing a stiffly worded letter asking if the Pixies can have ‘Debaser’ back it didn’t feel unoriginal so much as like all those bands who wanted to sound like the Stones.
Westside Cowboy were great fun; there’s little more perfect than a young band on their way up playing their biggest London gig yet. There was no chance to get bored with their 45 minutes’ worth of songs; and one could feel the excitement of the band: they could scarcely stop hugging each other at the end. What songs, too: ragged things that seem to fray and tear – often exploding into violent squalls of guitar – without ever ripping apart.
They also have a secret weapon: their drummer Paddy Murphy. A great many indie drummers are, to be honest, rubbish. Murphy, on the other hand, clearly fancies being UK indie’s Keith Moon, flailing around his kit and putting in fills where they have no right to be. A lot of the time his imagination lifted already good songs, but there were times when less might have been more: let us hear the rest of the band in this bit, eh?
Last year Westside Cowboy signed to an imprint of Universal, the world’s largest record label: you’ll be hearing more of them, so be thankful they’re worth hearing.
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