http://www.dotmusic.com/reviews/Live/May2002/reviews25030.asp
Gig played on: Tue 7 May 2002
NEIL HALSTEAD – THE SPITZ, LONDON
The tangled torture of the archetypal songwriter is a many-headed beast. As the weight of the world presses down on our troubled guitar hero and the about-to-crack mind housing their crumbling dreams, music tumbles out like an exorcism.
Such clich�s may seem exactly that, but Neil Halstead, Mojave 3 mainman and former Slowdive chief, does little to dispel them, as he sits alone, before a roundly transfixed Spitz.
Halstead, fresh from the beguiling, beatific folk-pop solo masterpiece ‘Sleeping On Roads’, cuts a solitary, unassuming figure this evening, struggling to remember songs, stumbling the between song banter and grappling with numerous harmonicas.
However, when in full flow, and despite being stripped of the wondrous instrumental flourishes of his recorded material, he gives a performance of profound, melancholic brilliance, and the kind that strangely often accompanies such fragility.
Halstead is, roughly, tip-toeing in Nick Drake’s shoes, whilst bringing a sound that is entirely his own. His wispy vocal lilt, joined by gliding, dextrous, spring resonating guitar playing, sets him apart from a string of artists who have been lined-up against that great but tragic figure in recent years.
It’s not just Halstead’s music but his ethereal lyrical panache that is redolent of Drake, as we are taken from the sky, flown across fields, over streams and oceans and towards the sun. The sound of nature, in the likes of opener ‘Driving With Bert’, ‘Seasons’ and ‘Sleeping On Roads’, creates an intimately charged whole, which is most splendidly realised on ‘See You On Rooftops’ and ‘Sleeping On Roads’.
And while there is actually an unconscious feeling of unequivocal joy, beyond the apparent emotional dislocation, Halstead’s work certainly has a torpid, wounded trench that, on ‘Martha’s Mantra’, admits, “the only thing I asked her, was did she have a plaster, for my pain?”
There is just one point when Halstead drops his guard, when confessing, in a tale of typically self-effacing woe, that he was recently landed with a �60 bill from a local video store after returning – a month late – not a complex art-house extravaganza but ‘American Pie II’.
Clearly not everything can be taken for granted in the world of the lost and lonesome singer/songwriter. That Halstead is extravagantly talented and capable of conjuring a beauty matched by few is, however, a given.
Ben Gilbert
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