Review: Diana Jones, Tunnels

CRH Promotions and the Tunnels provided a fantastic run of five shows during April (J W Jones, Sam Outlaw, Richmond Fontaine and Hayes Carll) the run closing with the justly acclaimed Diana Jones.

Daniel Meade opened the show with eight songs or so and with his feather cut and bum-freezer jacket looked more like Jeff Beck in his Yardbirds days than an Americana troubadour. He claimed that as a Glaswegian he wouldn’t be talking to us much, but nonetheless entertained with some amusing banter between the tunes – a mixture of older material and new cuts. Meade is an excellent guitar player, picking out some exceedingly pretty melodies whilst managing to get some rhythmic strumming in the mix to give a nice full sound to the songs. He has a rich melodious voice with a pleasingly rasping undertone; and powerful pipes too, letting go on Choking on the Ashes (Of the Bridges That I’ve Burned). His lyrics are astute and amusing, Let Me off at the Bottom resonating with the crowd and his tales of love & relationships chiming too. He Should Have Been Mine stood out, an innovative look at a failed relationship. Ending the set with a tribute to Merle Haggard, his version of Mama Tried concluded a rewarding set; hopefully he’ll make good on a promise to bring his band The Flying Mules to town in the autumn.

Diana Jones opened her set with a strident and urgent version of Willow Tree, joined by Meades on backing vox and guitar. It would be easy to focus on her singing as she has a full rich voice, effortlessly gliding round the melodies, and authoritative too; her third tune Cold Grey Ground was performed acapella and was simply stunning – powerful, haunting and genuinely moving. But Jones really does have a gift when it comes to her lyrics, her songs empathetic and evocative; telling stories that keep the listener gripped, even when they’ve heard the tune a dozen or more times. A case in point was Henry Russell’s Last Words, a song based on the final letter written by a miner as he slowly suffocated, trapped in the 1927 Everetteville mine explosion. Jones had met with the family and based the song on said letter; in a lesser writer’s hands the resulting tune could have been overly sentimental but Jones has created a wonderfully evocative tale that focuses on a man’s love for his wife and gives his death some meaning. She’s also willing to explore her own life for inspiration Prayer for my Brother a heart wrenching song describing the travails of her brother, something she’d never admitted for may years when performing this and other songs that related to her sibling.

The set covered Jones’s four recordings to date, Evangelina performed aggressively and twisting the accepted folk trope of women being maltreated and murdered by their men in to a new shape (and that has previously had the Guardian dubbing her a “hillbilly feminist”); a moving If I Had a Gun, preceded by an apology for the Presidential shenanigans; and a restrained melancholic I Told the Man. Despite much of the material exploring the darker side of life, the tunes never descended into mawkishness nor are they depressing; rather they amply illustrate that life is fickle and fate is vain but there is hope and redemption for all – even if only in accepting one’s destiny.

Meade’s backup vocals and guitar were superlative throughout the set; after the show he won a gold medal for self-deprecation claiming that he “…filled in a few gaps…” when actually his subtle fills, restrained solos and understated harmonies effortlessly fleshed out Jones’s songs. In fact the pair’s guitar interplay was superb thorough – meshing and weaving with a faultless chemistry, like an Appalachian Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson.

Concluding with an acapella The Other Side the pair left the stage to a rowdy ovation. Jones having told us that she was returning home to work on a memoir – something to look forward to but alas this may mean no new recordings or shows for a while. So if you missed out pick up a copy of Diana Jones Live in Concert – find out what you missed and keep an eye open for her return as you won’t be disappointed.

All pix by John Morgan