London
12 December 2019
Stepping onto the stage at The Lexington for the final date of their European tour, Holly Golightly and her band look tired but ready to go. Holly welcomes the audience and notes that, as there is an election party scheduled to follow their gig – which was booked months before the vote had been called, of course – that the set will have to be snappy and hurried through.
She may not be entirely serious, noting that it’s like “playing a K-Tel medley” of her songs, but, after taking the opportunity to exclaim “Fuck the Tories!” and dub them “fridge-hiding wankers” in reference to recent behaviour by the incumbent prime minister while out on the stump, she and her trio of stalwart sidemen launch into a series of bittersweet songs. Hers is an oeuvre that references love that can be as deep as the ocean and in danger of being broken into pieces by deception, where “you don’t know that woman like I do” seems like as much of a warning as a derisory put-down.
Forged in the Medway delta blues of her days in the circle of “Wild” Billy Childish and honed through subsequent years in the rather different environs of the deepest parts of the US Deep South, Holly’s music is a convincingly honest ride through stories that seem at once personal and universal. A good example is “Good Morning Captain”, dedicated to everyone here who has to work the next morning – or “all the fucking time” – and particularly in the aftermath of the election results that are still yet to come. Bradley Burgess‘s guitar spangles and tweaks into solos that bristle with electrical energy when required, without descending into cliché or egotistical excess, played with an effortless melodic brightness or sparking with deceptively casual brilliance. He sings harmonies when needed, and the slow burn of “Your Love Is Blind”, with its alternating line “Your love is mine”, prompts a murmuring call and response with the wavering crowd. Soon the band and audience rise up into an emotional collective invocation of the transcendent power of songs sung together in a group that is swaying blissfully, joined by words and movement strong enough to shut out the outside world and its cares for the duration.Each song is equally capable of sending the mood into a reflective swoon. “This is a true story”, observes Holly after a particularly heartfelt rendition of a slow-burning take on the existential blues of “Mother Earth”. The band perk things up with “Sally Go Round”, getting the crowd moving, bopping gently, pleased that one of their number had called out for a twenty-minute version of the song earlier in the night, though this take is somewhat shorter thanks to the approaching hour of decision and its afterparty.
Holly Golightly offers up garage rock’n’roll as it is meant to be, sinuous and sincere without falling into the pitfalls of the obvious tropes of the genre. Bruce Brand‘s steadily hypnotic drumming fuses with Matt Radford‘s fluid upright bass, while Holly plays her guitar surprisingly gently, coaxing soft strums while Badger takes care of the sparking fireworks as and when they make sense to include. Each musician circles the other to create a perfect whole while Holly’s voice renders tales of bitter deception and the fall of another love, or surges in profound expression of romantic rapture in its purest form.When exterior reality bites, it does so with a harsh grimness for those on the losing side as reports of what will turn out to be all-too accurate exit polls ping in messengers and text inboxes while the set ends. Thank goodness Holly Golightly is here to soothe and evoke the pain of being alive in times like these, in love or out of it, keeping the blues moving onwards into the next days, months and years, and whatever new twists in the tale they may bring.
-Richard Fontenoy-
