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Review: She Makes War, Louisiana
The latest in Laura Kidd’s terrific Breakfast With Apollo nights, this evening’s bill offered us a three way salvo of utterly charming acts.
Opener Adam Barnes and his mate Joe, delivered his delicate and fragile songs of love, disappointment and drowning with a lovely smile and a gentle manner. His stripped down cover of Whitney’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody should have been cloyingly twee, but instead had us singing along with hearty joy.
Next came SJ Esau and his table of wiry delights. Strangling tunes from the array of musical bits and bobs that lay before him he looked more like a mad space professor than any kind of standard pop musician. But the many-layered sounds he pieced together, married to his unassuming wit and inventive melodies, had us all soaring to the edge of disaster alongside him. A true original of the type that only Bristol can provide.
The icing on tonight’s Christmassy cake came from promoter Laura’s on stage alter ego, She Makes War. Coyly kicking things off with a ukulele and a cheeky smile, she led us through the many shades of her 70-minute set with some style and grace.
After three songs on her own, she invited her two-piece backing troupe onto the stage and began to rock out. And this is where things became interesting.
It was instantly apparent that the massively bearded guitarist was drifting seriously out of tune. But the harder he tried to retrieve the situation, the further from the musical truth he got. But Laura took it all in her stride, kicked off a rocking bass and drum jam and let the poor fella find his composure. Here’s a woman as comfortable on a stage as she is in her own arboreally tattooed skin, and tonight she’s clearly in her element.
The crowd – an unexpectedly dad-shaped mob, with the first three rows made up almost entirely of stout men in their 40s and 50s – hung on her every word as she conducted events like a head girl at a posh school for rock’n’roll weirdos.
And as she bravely ended the evening with two songs from the album she’s still recording, she left us with the cheery riposte: “Have a lovely Christmas and all that shit!”
What a lovely way to see in the festives.
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