The always-inspiring Union Chapel on Upper Street in Islington was our venue for John Hopkins and King Creosote, playing a jointly recorded LP venture.As is my wont recently, I pitched up for this entirely on the strength of a general liking-the-idea of it, and the enthusiastic recommendations of Chris and Sean, who'd actually taking the trouble of listening to the songs beforehand so that I didn't have to.
This was incredibly fragile music, with none of the robustness of verse-chorus-verse, or anything you'd call a beat. The vocal melodies were almost choral in their repetitiveness and undemonstrativeness. Even when KC's content is ostensibly emotional, there's very little emoting about it.
The electronics-enthusiast in me kept hearing the empty spaces where the Hopkins bounce of joyfully complex techno would normally be; the longer the songs went on, the more apparent it became that this would overload the show with unnecessary musical detail. Hopkins ended up playing more of his upright piano that he did the computer.
Halfway through the show, Chris told me that the ambient sound at the start of the first track was the field recording of dinner-table talk at someone's house: clattering, indistinct chatter, room air and the sound-scape around a house. This immediately placed everything in an almost painfully-intimate domestic frame, and the Talking-Heads-esque restraint in how much each person on stage did made for a genuinely magical gig.
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