The Jeff Lewis & Peter Stampfel Folk Show – Arts Centre, Norwich 23/01/11

The first thing I notice as I step into the Norwich Arts Centre gangway is a balding man hunched over a laptop, taking up a corner of a large table otherwise crowded with CDs, t-shirts and a handful of vinyls.

The laptop is upon Jeff Lewis and Peter Stampfel’s merch stall, and the man hunched over the laptop is Jeff Lewis. I’m here to see him for the second time in as many years, and the fourth since falling for his endlessly charming It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked that the Light Shines Through, a record which has been of more use to me over this period than I’m comfortable relaying to people I don’t know (like you).

Everything I’d like to say to Jeff is humbly recounted to my companion. As we make our way to the bar, our paths cross with a withered, lurching old fellow who seems way beyond the evening’s uppermost age-demographic and perhaps a little out of place, even in the context of this high-ceilinged, 13th Century church-cum-music-venue. But again – even though I have a strong inkling at who this fellow is – my lips remain sealed. This is a proper folk show, we’re just too scared to talk to the folk who put it on.

I catch the end of main support Tiger MCs, who sing lovely hushed lullabies which certainly owe a debt to the band Low, but not to such an extent that their catalogue ought to be repossessed. This pleases me and, it seems, the rest of the audience too. My companion comments that it would be “good music to drink soup to”; I agree, and think this is all that needs to be said for them.

So as we wait for the show to begin, the withered old fellow from before politely trots through the crowd and past a curtain and eventually he emerges onstage and of course this is Peter Stampfel himself, co-founder of Holy Modal Rounders and one-time Fugs member, whose hair is also rather impressive.

He squawks his hellos to the audience and as the set goes on the impression is not – as first it was – that of a lunatic convinced of his own genius but a genius convinced of his lunacy. Jeff explains mid-way through the set that Peter is an expert on bottle-caps. “He’s got a collection of over 1200 bottle-caps”, he explains, surprising nobody. We watch a slideshow of his bottle-cap collection while the band play a song called ‘Collecting Bottle-Caps is Cool’.

The show was two hours long and it didn’t bore me – I owe it the same favour. It also wouldn’t be proper to spoil Jeff’s new French Revolution comic-strip for you, nor the latest instalment in his ‘History of Communism’ series but, rest assured, they are present and don’t disappoint. A buzzing sound intrudes throughout the set’s quieter moments which Jeff is willing to overlook so we are too. “I’ll just look at the wall”, he says, because when he turns his back to the band and audience it makes the buzzing stop, and again we laugh.

As the set draws to a close with some romping ’60s ‘freak-folk’, I decide it would be a good idea to shout “YEAH” with a throaty conviction (like I’m from Grinderman). So I do and it turns out it is a good idea and it feels good.

Everyone has had a great time – a strange thing to be so sure of considering I spoke to no one but my companion the whole evening. It’s one of those ocassions where you just know.