MoorsholmLIVE! opened the Spring 2008 programme with Billy Mitchell, ex-Lindisfarne and Jack The Lad, who last played here at the Memorial Hall last year. As well as an audience of around sixty, excerpts from this latest offering in the new season will be seen by a much wider audience, Planet North TV having agreed to film an eight-part documentary series following regional performers around the North-East, including Billy.
Billy Mitchell’s blend of melancholy songs detailing his upbringing and life in the coal mining village of Wylam mixes well with his off-beat humour and self-deprecatory jokes about life in and around his native Tyneside. You have to chuckle along to a man who describes the estate where he now lives as a place “where you don’t close your windows at night in case you trap someone’s fingers” and an area where “the window cleaners use Black & Decker sanders”.
Billy opens with a song dedicated to his grandfather; his clear deep vocals coupled to his fingerstyle technique on his six-string guitar filled Moorsholm Memorial Hall with his evocative lyrics and musical ear for melody. Initial thoughts are of Bob Dylan without the badly-played harmonica that characterises much of Dylan’s musical library – Billy takes a more bluesy tack with the next song, written after the devastation that Hurricane Katrina left in New Orleans and written about the old blues legend Fats Domino.
Interspersing the songs with a wicked mix of observations and anecdotes, Billy has the audience laughing out loud with his story of the shiny toilet paper often found in schools pre-1980 and the phrase “skid marks on the back of the neck” will remain with me for a long time. Also, the extended monologue telling us of Billy’s upbringing in a house with his granny, granddad and five uncles, the latter six all coal miners in Wylam, acts as a perfect segue into one of the most haunting songs from Billy’s ‘The Devil’s Ground’ album, “The Collier Laddie’s Wife” – a story of life as the wife of a coal miner whose existence was often hard and thankless.
Billy introduces this song by telling us to imagine him in a frock for four and a half minutes, but this throwaway line can’t detract from the powerful, charged and atmospheric rendition of a favourite song of mine.
As well as having a wealth of original material on which to draw, Billy keeps the crowd entertained with some choice cover versions, including material written by Louden Wainwright III and the traditional Irish ballad “Black Velvet Band”, prompting the audience to sing heartily.
Discussing his dyslexia and the inherent problems with reading stage directions for Othello (“Enter Ophelia from behind” proving particularly problematic), Billy also regales us with a tale of the time he found himself in a convoy of Morris 1000 Travellers in Finchley High Street and the omnipresent language barrier that people from the North East often find when venturing down south.
Switching to his twelve-string guitar to add an extra dimension to his compositions, we are treated to another couple of songs before the interval, and the tale of how Billy and his wife originally had six children but hung one as an example ...
Half-time sees the inevitable raffle plus the presentation of a cheque for £350 to Teesside Hospice, a worthy cause.
The second half kicks off at a fast pace, with “Going Back to Dublin”, “Ghost in Blue Suede Shoes” and a brace of songs from “The Devil’s Ground” – both “Devil’s Ground” and “1915-1972” are evocative, stripped back versions of the recorded tunes but no less effective as a result. The latter in particular being a moving tale of Billy’s father’s life, moving from miner to soldier in World War II then back to the mine and eventually working out his life in a Newcastle bar.
Billy then throws in another of his humorous songs, “Wokin’ the Dog”, a cautionary tale of Hong Kong cuisine, apparently inspired by the story of the then-Hong Kong ambassador Chris Patton’s dog going missing. Containing lines such as “... rover pavlova with whippet cream ....”, the audience barely had chance to breathe between the gales of laughter that echoed around the Memorial Hall.
A Bob Dylan cover and more original material brings the second half to a conclusion, along with more bawdy tales of darts matches, coming home drunk and inevitable miscommunication between Billy and his wife.
As an encore, we are treated to “You’ve Got A Friend” by James Taylor, audience participation again being to the forefront of the music.
As an opener to the new season of music at Moorsholm, Billy Mitchell put in a solid and well-received performance that went down a storm with the assembled audience and really whetted appetites for further musical delights in the months to come.
Richard Beadnall
