Arts Café, Toynbee Hall, London
3 July 2001
One of the things about getting older is the urge to mellow out, to chill into a fully-realised state. Warn Defever has been skimming the surfaces and wading into the depths of music for over a decade now, and his frequently disparate collision of sounds and genres onto each His Name Is Alive record has been whittled down into a focussed approach to collecting sounds together. This has found its most recent form on the (apparently, deceptively) polished R&B sheen of the surprising Someday My Blues Will Cover The Earth, but anyone expecting the live show accompanying that album to revolve around funky beats and low basslines was in for yet another raised eyebrow moment – the latest in a long series from Defever and company.
Instead, the swooningly hot interior of the Arts Café is graced by a cross-legged audience rammed against the late-arriving standees and their perspiration, and the struggle downstairs of the band onto the stage area. The coffee-bar atmosphere is only enhanced by Defever’s shaved head and straggling beard, but all eyes can only be on the diminuitively fragile figure of Lovetta Pippen in her glass stack shoes and all. And then she sings, and what Lovetta sings to the accompaniment of Defever on semi-acoustic guitar and the quietly competent bass player over in the far corner is the Blues, pure and simple, with the emphasis on those two adjectives.
Lovetta Pippen’s voice is strong and shifts across those heartfelt old melodies the Western world has taken to its collective soul with ease; every ear in the house is turned to catch the words, dark as they are. Let’s not forget that, despite the apparent sheen of a wavering voice and the NME Dance Single of The Week award diversions, what His Name Is Alive have always explored through the lyrics of their songs has been the interior world of doubt and confusion. Observational and questioning, the words sometimes feel like stream of consciousness reports from somewhere slightly outside the human sphere of existence, and this is especially apparent on the re-worked classic “Are We Still Married?”, given a emotional workover by Lovetta Pippen tonight. Likewise, when she sings the old Bessie Smith/Duke Ellington Blues tune “Solitude” it points another finger at the heart of HNIA’s lateral worldview, drawing down echoes of smoky bars in heat-filled rooms a continent and an era far away. “Write My Name In The Groove” and “Your Cheating Heart”, stripped of their bass-bin shaking beats, still fill the room with their intensely personal (in affect if not necessarily autobiographical detail) bitter-sweet words of love and all it implies to great lyrical effect.
The key element in a His Name Is Alive performance which may well keep the audience coming is the talents Defever brings to the group to join him; Pippen is a significant find, and she lends the night a warmth to match the close humidity of the room which not even a couple of ceiling fans can do much for but swirl the dank air around the jam-packed audience; prompting Warn to ask people to join the band onstage and to inquire of the people escaped to the courtyard if they can hear OK. Next time, His Name Is Alive might be swinging Amish bikers or jumping the train to Bhangra’n’Bass; no matter, because tonight they have covered the earth with their Blues after all.
-Linus Tossio-
