Steve Mason – The Village Underground, London 11/04/13

It’s busy in here. Which may be a boring, predictable and fairly pedestrian thing to say about a sold-out gig, but it is. Really busy. Busy enough to suggest there may be an Animal Farm slant to this. Maybe some sold out gigs are more sold out than others. If so, Steve Mason is definitely looking at the higher end of the spectrum.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that there is also a properly joyous feeling in the air. Starting with the musicians up front, then reflected fore and aft through the crowd, even causing some sporadic outbreaks of dancing amongst the soundmen. From the moment Mason enters, with a “ding-dong”, which suggests he’s probably not going to be looking into black suit hire for Wednesday, the word which springs to mind is ebullient.

While it makes for big smiles all around, it does occasionally strikes you as a little bit of a change from where the work was originally cast. The songs from his solo career, from which tonight is completely drawn, are on record a bit more poignant and a bit more subtle than the big bold numbers which appear here. Where the looping beat of Mason’s songs was once a thoughtful trek through suffering towards enlightenment, here it’s more of a shuffle towards victory.

But while it may be different and at the slight expense of some the oddness that Mason has always wrapped himself in, it makes for a great live atmosphere. The opening trio, a mystically tinged ‘Lost and Found’, a gorgeously sunny ‘Oh My Lord’ and a brilliant ‘Seen It All Before’ inflate the occasion with a triumphant buoyancy that never gets released. The crowd applauds Steve, Steve applauds the crowd, and the whole thing becomes a perpetual appreciation machine which can’t help but warm the cockles of your heart.

The baggy ‘All Over You’, retrieved from the vastly under appreciated King Biscuit Time album, with it’s refrain of “Loneliness / Sadness / Joyless / Lifeless” a Latin translation away from being the worst school motto ever, is nagging and insistent. ‘Fight Them Back’, played immediately after he offers heartfelt thanks to those who stopped it going “tits-up” for him seems less like a political rabble rouser and more like a mantra aimed at himself (“You get up and fight them back”).

If the restless melancholy of his records suggested someone who has been fighting for a while, this performance suggests he’s finally winning. An artist who for a variety of reasons has not either had it, or made it, easy finally finding peace. And you’d have to be a cold-hearted bastard to deny him that.

Photograph by Kevin Morosky.