Saturday, August 25, 2007

Who wants to be the last of anything?

I’m trying to get through these quickly but it seems to be taking a while, eh?

Devendra Banhart

I’ve put up two sets today, both of which I enjoyed immensely. The first is this one from Devendra Banhart, which featured a full band (made up largely, as I said yesterday by members of Vetiver), and was not quite the kooky acoustic affair I was expecting. In fact opinion on the Green Man message boards has been pretty mixed, a number of people not going for his full band sound. The word “Santana” was mentioned at one point. (No need for language like that…). But Michael and I had a great time watching.

I should say that the set also featured a sort of impromptu open mike section, where he invited anyone who’d recently written a song on stage – a game lass from Newcastle jumped on stage and did her thing. I’ve included this part in the recording but to be honest I could have done without the whole thing…




Soft Hearted Scientists

The second session I’ve got here was a great set from Partly Porpoise favourites the Soft Hearted Scientists, whom I fear I’ve neglected somewhat recently. They cheered up a fairly bedraggled audience with their gentle mix of atmospheric keyboard sounds and quirky songs, and played a combination of songs from their first album and their new one which has just appeared. The versions of “Brother Sister” and “Wendigo” were particularly good, I thought.


3 comments:

Trader Woody said...

Yeah, my wife and I also were pretty disappointed by Devendra. I've seen him before and thought that his showmanship was a breath of fresh air, but this time it took over and the whole experience was hollow. That whole deal with the audience member getting up on stage was a cop-out. If they had stayed on to back her up, it could have been worthy, but they just buggered off backstage! Musically it was a little corny. I was planning to see him again in Manchester, but won't bother now...

Trader Woody said...

Oh, by the way - cheers for uploading all the recordings from Green Man. Much appreciated. I've uploaded a few Green Man videos to YouTube if you're interested.

Sweeny said...

D'you know, as soon as the lady came up on stage, I found myself thinking, "but I wanted to see Devendra playing, not you..." and then castogated myself for being so small-minded. But at the time, I though it was a one-off piece of spontaneity, not a regular party piece.

I've got a couple more recordings to upload, too, if you're not all fed up of them...

btw have looked at some fo the Green Man vids, are you TraderWoody?