Gig review: Graham Coxon Power Acoustic Ensemble

Published on Friday 13 November 2009 18:03

THE GRAHAM COXON POWER ACOUSTIC ENSEMBLE *** QUEEN'S HALL, EDINBURGH

THE last time Graham Coxon played in Scotland, he was headlining T in the Park. But Blur's guitarist seemed more comfortable sitting on a dimly lit stage in the Queen's Hall with the standing audience craning their necks to catch a glimpse of him.

Earlier this year, Coxon released his umpteenth solo album, Spinning Top, swapping the lo-fi garage cacophony of his previous releases for a dip into pastoral folk tradition. His Power Acoustic Ensemble contains some of the musicians who played on the album, including a fellow purveyor of English psychedelic whimsy, Robyn Hitchcock, occasionally letting rip on guitar, plus guests popping up for the gigs around the country.

Coxon played the little boy lost with a garnish of wry self-deprecating wit – "I don't trust my own brain; I have to have back-up for every thought I have" – but marshalled his forces with charm. The influence of Nick Drake and John Martyn on his songs and playing was self-evident but the acoustic reverie was rudely punctured by a couple of psych-rock outbursts before Coxon called a ten-minute intermission, "like in the old days when they had LPs".

The second half was noisier and more experimental, kicking off with Caspian Sea's mix of nursery rhyme melody and instrumental discord, and making use of esoteric touches such as distorted guitars, Asian-influenced arrangement and, at one point, the resolutely non-acoustic penetrating reverberation of a synthesiser.

In contrast, Coxon encored on his own, playing stripped-back renditions of previous solo material before the night's special guest, John McCusker, dropped by with his fiddle to join in on a version of Elizabeth Cotten's Oh Baby It Ain't No Lie – a brief incursion into the heritage songbook to close this unconventional little hootenanny.