Tag Archives: Mostly Autumn

Friday’s gig at the Bury Met was the first time I’ve seen Mostly Autumn since Rhyl back in May. Just like everyone else I had great difficultly in actually getting there; for the second day running the trains were farkled by a broken down train, and a plethora of road accidents had gridlocked the entire road network in Lancashire; the number 130 bus took an hour and a half to get into Manchester, which scuppered my plans to get anything to eat before the show.

The gig was well up to MA’s usual standards. Most MA gigs I’ve been about halfway back, but this time I met up with a bunch of regulars from the Mostly Autumn Forum, and ended up right up at the front. The downside of this is that you don’t get a perfect sound mix, since most of what you hear is from the monitors rather than through the PA. I ended up with a lot of lead vocals, flute, and Liam Davidson’s guitar, and not quite enough keyboards or lead guitar. The upside was that I was only six feet away from Heather and Angela! It was also interesting to hear exactly what Liam plays; while his guitar parts make a contribution to the overall sound, he’s not usually that prominent in the mix.

There were absolutely no surprises in the setlist, although we weren’t really expecting any. I think the only change from Rhyl was that they played “Passengers” instead of “Answer the Question”. High spot was a sublime version of “Carpe Diem”, although “Shrinking Violet” ran it close. The jigs, which some people love and some people hate went down well with the crowd, as did the call-and-response between Bryan Josh and Olivia Sparnenn on “Never the Rainbow”.

The only time they really stumbled was “Nowhere To Hide (Close My Eyes)” which exposed the limitations of Bryan’s vocals, and is precisely the sort of oldie that really ought to be retired from the setlist.

They closed with the perennial epics, “Heroes Never Die” and “Mother Nature”, the latter ending with Bryan playing a few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”.

While I’ve been critical of the rather conservative setlist, this set does strongly showcase Angela Gordon’s flute playing, and she was on really good form last night. But what was it that she found so amusing about DEMU T-shirt?

Last Friday I saw the magnificent Mostly Autumn play the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl. For those not familiar with the place, Rhyl is an old-fashioned British seaside resort, where all the shops sell sticks or rock and Donald McGill postcards. This is the first time I’ve seen them since the departure of keyboard player Iain Jennings.

The Pavilion Theater seats about a thousand, and is a big venue for a band more used to playing clubs. While they didn’t fill it, they did manage to attract a fair-sized audience, both fans like me who’d travelled a fair distance, and plenty of locals who’d not seen them live before. When you used to seeing the band crammed into a tiny club stage with hardly enough space to move, it’s strange to see the eight of them spread out across the enormous theatre stage. There were one or two occasions where I feared Bryan would do a Frank Zappa and fall into the orchestra pit.

It’s also strange to see them in a seated venue. From my seat facing Bryan’s side of the stage, the sound mix had a little bit too much guitar, and not quite enough keyboards, which seemed to emphasise Iain Jennings’ absence. This does mean that flautist/keyboardist Angela Gordon has a much bigger role on stage, sharing Ian’s keyboard parts with new boy Chris Johnson, as well as playing a lot of flute. She’s also out front rather than being half-hidden at the back.

The two and a half hour set concentrated on old favourites. They started with the lengthy Floydian “The Last Climb”, which always seems to me to be a slightly odd choice for an opening number when the band have plenty of uptempo rockers in the setlist. The first half of the set was good enough, with the flute-driven rockers “Caught in a Fold” and “Dark Before the Dawn”, and a lengthy solo spot from Liam Davidson before “Spirit of Autumn Past”. Things really caught fire after the interval. After “Heart Life”, the ‘rocked-up celtic jig’ section finally got a large part of the audience out of their seats. (I think most of the people who criticise the band for ‘those awful jigs’ have never seen the band live). Then came an absolutely storming version of “Never the Rainbow”, with Heather and backing singer Olivia Sparnenn singing alternate lines, followed by the call-and-response between Olivia and Bryan’s guitar. In complete contrast, it’s nice to hear “Shrinking Violet” restored to the set, which had been absent the last couple of times I’ve seen them. The one real surprise was “Close my Eyes” from the band’s debut album. They closed the main set with a magnificent “Carpe Diem”. Encores were “Heroes Never Die” and, of course, the epic “Mother Nature”.

While it was sad to hear about Iain’s departure, his absence hasn’t diminished the band’s live performances. If you get a chance to see them live, go. You won’t be disappointed.

This is the second time I’ve seen MA play at this small club in Crewe. Last time was the Christmas special before a packed crowd. This time it wasn’t completely sold out, but there was still a good attendance for a Thursday night. With the retail release of the new album “Storms Over Still Water” just four days away, there was an atmosphere of anticipation. I was unable to make the launch gig in London in June, so this would be the first time I’d heard most of “Storms” performed live.

Just after half past nine the six of the seven band members trooped on stage and Bryan Josh struck up the opening chords of “Out of the Green Sky”, the hard-rocking first number from “Storms”. It’s difficult to fit the whole band on the Limelight’s small stage; this meant bassist Andy Smith and second guitarist Liam Davidson were half hidden away at the back on the edge of the drum riser, and anyone on the right hand side of the hall would have had trouble seeing flautist Angela Gordon behind Iain Jennings Wakemanesque mountain of keyboards.

Heather Findlay made a dramatic entrance just in time to sing the soaring chorus, looking as stunning as ever, even though we didn’t get to see the spray-on red catsuit she wore in London.

The band were both tight and enthusiastic, and gave the crowd two and a half hours of stunning music ranging mixing rousing hard rock with floydian soundscapes and celtic atmospherics. They’ve very much got their own sound, and longer sound like a jumble of diverse influences. Heather’s singing has a lot more power now, and she can belt out hard rockers as well as the softer ballads. Bryan’s gravelly lead vocals make a good counterpoint, and he too is much improved. His guitar playing is great two, with a nod to Dave Gilmour and Richie Blackmore, but his solos are never quite long enough to outstay their welcome. I’d like to have heard a bit more of Angela’s flute playing; she’s now playing keyboards a lot of the time.

The setlist mixed a lot of new songs with plenty of older classics, although they’ve now reached the stage where they’ve got so much good material that there’s not room for everyone’s favourites even in a set of this length. I believe they’re rotating a lot of songs, both new and old, in and out of the set rather than playing the same show each night, which probably explains the mix up mid-set, when Bryan and Heather had different ideas over what the next song was supposed to be! They played the obvious standards such as “Heroes Never Die”, “The Spirit of Autumn Past”, “Evergreen”, “Caught in a Fold” and “Passengers”. The celtic/folky/Tolkien era wasn’t completely ignored with a rousing version of the instrumental “Out of the Inn”. There were even a few surprises, such as “Winter Mountain”, from 1999′s “Sprit of Autumn Past”, which I’d not heard them play live before.

The “Storms” material focussed on the shorter songs, “Heart Life”, which they’ve been playing live for a while, the Uriah Heep-meets-Oasis rockout of “Black Rain”, and the lighter “Broken Glass”, which I found much more impressive live than on record. The only longer song featured was “Candle in the Sky”. I would have liked to have heard “Carpe Diem” or the title track, but we can’t have everything unless they play for four hours.

They finished, as they always do, with the epic “Mother Nature”, stretched out to 15 minutes, building up from a gentle beginning to that magnificent sweeping chorus, followed by the atmospheric instrumental section before the rousing finale, which ended with Bryan teasing us with a few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”.

Mostly Autumn really deserve to be playing bigger venues than this. Put them on tour with someone like The Darkness or Coldplay and they’d blow them off stage. Their commercial success has been limited by the fashion-driven nature of the British music scene, where you don’t get a look in unless you’re the right kind of three chord poseurs to impress the clique of London-based psuedo-intellectual music press scribblers. Hopefully things are beginning to change; there are signs that real music played by real musicians is making a comeback.

I first saw Mostly Autumn a few months back in Manchester, and immediately wanted to see them again; they were that good. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to any dates on their November “V” tour due to other commitments, so the next opportunity I had was their Christmas gig at the Limelight Club in the old railway town of Crewe.

Before the show, I met up in the bar at Crewe station with an old friend, Crewe resident Sasha, who I haven’t seen for something like a year. An hour or so (and a couple of beers) later, I set off into the windswept and rainy streets of Crewe in search of the venue, the location of which I had the only the vaguest of ideas. Fortunately The Limelight Club turned out to be roughly in the area I though it was, and I managed to locate it without getting lost.

The Limelight is one of those warren-like clubs, with a maze of twisty passages all alike leading to the main concert hall; I suspect the internal layout must have been designed by someone who used to write Dungeons and Dragons adventures; all that was missing was the neo-otyugh by the bar. Unlike some clubs I’ve attended, they do serve decent beer; unfortunately Mostly Autumn don’t do drum solos.

There’s always something special at a packed gig in a small club with a great band, especially when much of the crowd is made up from hard core fans. Tonight was no exception. Mostly Autumn hit the stage at about half-past nine before an expectant crowd, and certainly did not disappoint.

Mostly Autumn sit at the opposite end of the progressive rock spectrum to bands such as Dream Theater or King Crimson; they’re not about complex time signatures and high energy technical virtuosity that blurs into white noise. Instead they’re about atmospheres and melodies, evoking the wide open spaces of the Yorkshire moors, still classed as ‘Progressive’ because their rich sound is nevertheless an order of magnitude more complex that the fashionable three-chord stuff that seems to pass as ‘rock’ nowadays. Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright is a big fan.

Just to get people worried, only five of the seven appeared onstage for the opening number, ‘Return of the King’ from the “Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings” album, with Bryan Josh singing. But missing members Heather Findlay and Angela Goldthorpe made a dramatic entrance at the end of the song, and they stormed straight into ‘Caught in a Fold’. After that they proceeded with song after song with little or no stage announcements. With a short interval, they played well over two hours of superb music, ranging from Floydian atmospherics and soaring epics through Tull-like hard rockers to folk-rock instrumentals showcasing Angela Goldthorpe’s flute playing.

Much like the last show I saw, the setlist drew heavily from the recent albums “Passengers” and “The Last Bright Light”. They still played the highlights from the first two albums, such as ‘Spirit of Autumn Past’, ‘Evergreen’, ‘The Last Climb’ and ‘Heroes Never Die’, with it’s echoplexed guitar reminding me a lot of the late lamented Twelfth Night. An instrumental section in the middle of the set included ‘Shindig’, with Angela’s flute playing what had originally been the violin part. They also played one new song, ‘Heart Life’, presumably from their forthcoming “Storms over Still Water”.

Being two days before Christmas, the band treated us to some special Christmas encores. First was a spine-tingling rendition of the traditional carol ‘Silent Night’, sung solo by Heather. Then came a version of Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’, and Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody, sung by guitarist Liam Davidson (accompanied by most of the crowd), wearing an elf’s hat with Noddy ears. You can hardly accuse them of taking themselves too seriously with that one. They followed that with ‘Fairytale in New York’. Finally, just in case anyone had forgotten they’re not a pub cover band, they closed with the soaring epic ‘Mother Nature’, which has become their signature song, summing up everything that’s great about the band fifteen minutes.

Setlist:
The Return of the King/ Caught in a Fold/ The Dark Before the Dawn/ Something in Between/ Evergreen/ Half the Mountain/ Close your Eyes/ Simple Ways/ Passengers

The Last Climb/ Distant Train/ Answer the Question/ Shrinking Violet/ Heroes Never Die/ The Spirit of Autumn Past/ Out of the Inn/ Shindig/ Never the Rainbow/ Heart Life

Encores
Silent Night/ I Believe in Father Christmas/ Merry Christmas Everybody/ Fairytale of New York/Mother Nature

I can’t think of any other time I’ve been to a gig and found myself unable to listen to the music of any other band for several days afterwards. But since Wednesday night’s performance in Manchester by Mostly Autumn, nothing other than “The Last Bright Light” and “Passengers” has been anywhere near my CD player.

For the uninitiated, Mostly Autumn hail from York (That’s old York, not the new one), and their sound mixes progressive rock and folk elements to produce a rich multi-layered sound. The show a strong influence from Pink Floyd, with occasional moments of heavier bands such as Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. But the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. And live, they create a very special atmosphere.

The band have two lead vocalists; the ethereal voice of Heather Findlay contrasts with the gruffer style of Bryan Josh, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn. Josh also plays some superb lead guitar, reminiscent of Richie Blackmore. MA have toured extensively with Blackmore’s Night, and some the Man In Black’s magic must have worn off.

In a small club it’s hard to fit all seven of the band on stage, especially with Iain Jennings’ 70s-style mountain of keyboards filling the right hand side. This resulted in second guitarist Liam Davidson and flautist/backing vocalist Angela Goldthorpe being half-hidden at the back of the stage.

The set drew heavily from the both the harder-edged “Passengers” and it’s mellower and atmospheric predecessor “The Last Bright Light”. Some of the songs from the latter were among the high point of the set, especially the haunting ballad “Half The Mountain”, dedicated to the recently split Karnataka, and the epic final encore, “Mother Nature”.

Mostly Autumn deserve to be far bigger than they are; not playing a currently fashionable style of music means the mainsteam music press completely ignores them. They’re doing a short British tour of larger venues in late November/early December; go and see them, you won’t be disappointed.