Music / improvisation
Review: Paul Bradley, Colston Hall foyer
Sat on a chair in the middle of the Foyer stage Paul Bradley’s isolated figure emphasised the enormity of the space around him and the scale of his task. As an improvising musician and songwriter he has a CD of improvised material to present via the medium of improvisation … “No-one’s ever heard this music before and no-one’ll ever hear it again,” he explained at one point. He had an interesting audience to convince, too, dominated by the queue for a Kraftwerk-themed show upstairs and fans of Welsh rockers Stereophonics.
Typically, then, Bradley started by mystifying, using guitar and loops to build a kind of weather ambience that grew into a gravelly machine noise from which emerged his trademark choirboy vocals introducing himself. It was the beginning of something almost seamless, a current of musical and lyrical ideas that wove and swelled through countless changes and unexpectednesses with a logic even the man himself could not explain.
Importantly, though, the ingredients were always conventionally musical, if unconventionally used: towards the end a looped Baroque vocal chorus quoted Johnny B. Good while he added a throat singing drone, at another the vocal muttered ‘God help us, he’s trying to be rock’n’roll’ as the guitar grooved a Kraftwerk backbeat. “That was your cue!” he called, to the queue.There were other funny moments: at one point he announced a guitar solo only to play one single note – “It doesn’t have to be complicated!” – as the queue looked down, on the whole benevolently bemused.
We use the word ‘incomparable’ far too loosely but it is genuinely impossible to think of another artist like Paul Bradley. His vocal skills and (upside-down left-handed) guitar technique alone are remarkable, his technical facility with loop technology outstrips all those ‘loud. louder, stop’ merchants but even those qualities are less significant than his capacity to unleash his imagination in public. Sat alone on that chair, surrounded by a largely involuntary audience he turned the blank canvas of the moment into an elaborately animated painting that, as he’d said, was unrepeatable and, for those that got it at least, also highly entertaining.
