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Review: Glenn Hughes, O2 Academy
Blues-rock is certainly having something of a ‘moment’ with hordes of young acts pursuing that lucrative Joe Bonamassa dollar. Clean-cut Brit Laurence Jones is a serious contender with a trophy cabinet of gongs to his name. But this support show seemed an odd way to set out his stall to the uninitiated. The good news is that he’s a terrific guitarist. But you’d expect nothing less. He also has an excellent keyboard player who gives it plenty of swirling Hammond organ. However, his songs seem to be drawn straight from the blues-rock union rulebook. There’s the short punchy one and the long mournful one that builds to a frenzied climax.
While we’re waiting patiently for the knockout hit-in-waiting, he takes a lengthy detour into the Hendrix reading of All Along the Watchtower, with a few bars of the Stones’ Miss You bunged in for no apparent reason. It’s all pleasant enough, but sounds like one of those airbrushed classic rock covers one might expect to hear soundtracking a car ad. Then comes another cover – John Forgerty’s angry CCR draft dodger song Fortunate Son.
is needed now More than ever
And that’s our lot from a fella with six albums to his credit. While we’re still feeling somewhat underwhelmed, he makes a return to the stage with another original song, Live It Up. And guess what? It’s great: punchy, powerful, memorable. Everything his main set wasn’t. A revamp would appear to be in order, sir.
A paucity of good songs is not a problem that afflicts Glenn Hughes. Indeed, the set list for this Classic Deep Purple show practically writes itself. The only dilemma he faces is in what order to play them. Spookily, he looks just like the giant backdrop photograph of himself taken in the mid-seventies. Maybe he’s got some kind of Dorian Gray-type deal going on, or this is testimony to the unexpected preservational properties of cocaine and Mars bars, on which he gorged in the ’80s before cleaning up. But one thing’s for sure: when he launches in to opener Stormbringer, those claims about singing better than ever aren’t just PR hyperbole. He’s on quite astonishing form throughout this near two-hour set, ducking not a single note as he ventures towards areas of the audio spectrum accessible only to our canine chums.
Hughes has been touring his Deep Purple show for months now and his talented regular collaborators Soren Anderson (guitar) and Jesper Bo Hansen (keyboards), together with new drummer Fernando Escobedo, know exactly what to do with it, being suitably respectful of how these songs originally sounded while relishing the opportunity to stretch out and jam when occasion permits. Gettin’ Tighter, Hughes’s sole songwriting credit with his spiritual brother the late Tommy Bolin, is a superb example of this, with Glenn breaking out the wah-wah pedal he tells us he hasn’t used since 1975 to drive the song well beyond its original three-and-a-half minutes without losing its way or becoming self-indulgent.
Rock history tells us that the funkier, more soulful Mark III and Mark IV incarnations of Deep Purple, from which much of this set is drawn, were hugely controversial among fans and, indeed Deep Purple themselves, from whom Ritchie Blackmore eventually stomped off. But perhaps because hard rock and metal now work from a broader palette, time has been kind to these songs and today nobody feels obliged to take sides between Funky Purple and Hard Rock Purple.
After a scintillating reading of You Keep on Moving, Hughes underlines his commitment to going beyond studio versions by returning to the spirit of the record-breaking 1974 California Jam for You Fool No One, with a High Ball Shooter mid-section. (“Mr. Blackmore had a fit. I shat myself,” he recalls of the event. Thanks for that image, Glenn.) This means two things: (1) it will be very long indeed, and (2) the dreaded keyboard and guitar solos will also feature, though these are mitigated by the driving rendition which highlights his often under-appreciated skills as a bassist
“I know I talk too much,” he says at an early point in the set, and proceeds to do just that for most of the evening, his unfiltered logorrhoea taking in how he loves his cats and the beach, how he was named after Glenn Miller, how he learned to play the trombone as a child, and much, much more. His accent veering from Black Country to California and back again, he also tells us 56,478 times how much he loves us and how grateful he is that we all turned up. This could all be cringingly embarrassing had it not been so genuine and unrehearsed, the self-deprecating lovable old hippy clearly being delighted and somewhat surprised to still be here after all that rock’n’roll misbehaviour. He also speaks movingly about his emotional previous show in Bristol, which he played just after his mother died because she’d insisted he shouldn’t cancel it. He’s funny too. “I don’t remember smiling much in the seventies. And I don’t remember the eighties,” he tells us at one point, adding with a smirk: “You do, though. You won’t let me forget…”
Mistreated remains another show-stopping set-piece for those vocal gymnastics, after which . . . well, would it surprise you to learn that Smoke on the Water makes an appearance? At least this is the punchy, fat-free Mark IV arrangement that segues unexpectedly into Georgia on My Mind. No, really. It’s hard to picture Mr. Blackmore agreeing to that.
Highway Star, the only other song in this set that Hughes didn’t originally perform, leads the encore, followed by a full-throttle, crowd-pleasing Burn. It’s safe to conclude that of all the bands legitimately entitled to perform this material, including David Coverdale’s Whitesnake and Deep Purple themselves (who admittedly tend to steer clear of this section of their oeuvre), no one is doing so with quite the same power and passion as Glenn Hughes.
All photos by Shona Cutt
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: October 2018
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