Live review: Jesse Malin

Published on Thursday 1 July 2010 21:06

JESSE MALIN **** CABARET VOLTAIRE, EDINBURGH

FOR one so taken with the redemptive individuality of rock n roll, New York singer-songwriter Jesse Malin does seemto draw an obedient crowd. The centrepiece of this show came when he strode out into the audience during an encore of Solitaire (which began as an unamplifed guitar solo before evolving into a Springsteen-like anthem) and commanded everyone to sit down around him.

They did, and he proceeded to tell us how the prejudices of his home borough of Queens – where every punk kid in the early 1980s was presumed to be gay and on heroin – drove him to Brooklyn, and of his love of the Ramones and Dead Kennedys.

His new band The StMarks Social are named in honour of those days, and the hipster East Village street that was the epicentre of New York's counterculture three decades ago. Looking like the cast of Scorsese's Mean Streets,even their guitarist Todd Youth –a Malin collaborator years ago in the Johnny Thunders-infuenced DGeneration – is a throwback to the good old days the singer recreates so well.

More than the music, though, he recreates the everyman spirit of Springsteen during Lonely Days and In the Modern World, or the raw, naive excitement of his punk heroes. This, and a winning way with confessional chat ("I'monly Jewish when there's awar on, otherwise this band is my religion"), means it's little wonder his disciples are so faithful.