Holly Arrowsmith with Skyscraper Stan – The Tuning Fork (Concert Review)

A full bill at the Tuning Fork last night saw Tom Cunliffe, and then Skyscraper Stan, open for Holly Arrowsmith. Arrowsmith topped the bill, but she wasn’t the highlight of the show.

Cunliffe kicked the evening off with a fairly rudimentary set of by-the-numbers folk numbers, one man and a guitar offering little new to the singer-storyteller formula. A potentially intriguing reading of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run was marred by buzzing from a loose wire somewhere between his Telecaster and the PA system, but the appearance onstage of Dave And Jessica, a couple of Cunliffe’s fiddling mates, added a much-needed extra dimension to a well-received but slightly underwhelming set.

Stan Woodhouse is, let’s be fair, alarmingly tall, his stage name of Skyscraper Stan not at all unwarranted. He had, as he told the Tuning Fork’s audience, half an hour to play; accompanied by Oskar Herbig, his cousin and a member of his band the Commission Flats, he played a superbly entertaining set. Just A Gigolowas a surprising show-opener, Stan’s voice deeper and richer than one might expect from looking at the man. In half an hour, Skyscraper Stan stole the evening, his songs complex and engaging. Woody Guthrie was a little nugget of American skiffle that bounced along; I Fell Over — “we can do sombre, too” — was a perfectly-crafted slice of introspection and melody.  Herbig’s guitar — blues soloing on an acoustic guitar is a tough ask; Herbig managed it quite effortlessly on Woodie Guthrie and Dancing On My Own Grave. In the studio, Stan and his backing band are a full-bodied rock experience; stripped back just to Stan and Oskar, the experience is purely acoustic, but no less intense. In his half an hour, Stan performed a full, and exceptionally entertaining, set — “Wasn’t that the fastest half hour of your life?” he asked at the end of his show, “Aren’t we fun?” And there was simply no arguing — this had been a bloody good show.

Skyscraper Stan was, then, a tough act to follow. I would so very much like to be able to report that Holly Arrowsmith was equal to the task, but, sadly, Stan was that good, and, to be blunt, Holly wasn’t. With a four-piece backing band — “I wanted to play the songs the way they sound on the album” — she played her new album. That’s it — her new album. In the fifty-five minutes she was on stage, she was an entirely pleasant and agreeable presence, a static performer physically and, disappointingly, much of the time vocally too, but she lacked little of the spark, the energy, that a live performance needs. When she put her mind to it, her voice was capable of rich emotion and power, but this happened a little less often than I would have preferred. When it did, on songs like Mountain Prayer, which started off as a very understated guitar-and-voice number with rumbling floor-tom accompaniment but which grew into a full-band workout of power and intensity, Arrowsmith teased us with evidence of potential that went untapped in much of the rest of the show. Lady Of The Valley, Arrowsmith’s guitar backed up by a pedal steel, was more typical of the show’s short setlist, an early Cowboy Junkies out-take, her voice subjected to just a little too much reverb.

That I noticed the work of the mixing desk is perhaps emblematic of what was wrong with Holly Arrowsmith’s show. Her music is pleasant, agreeable, nice — but ultimately a little forgettable. When she arrived on stage at a little after 10pm and announced “Thank you for coming — I’m Holly,” she maybe realised that her thunder had been stolen by her opener. Show-stealing notwithstanding, her music was a tad one-dimensional, her songwriting perfectly decent but simply lacking the depth and complexity of others’. I found myself noticing that the snare drum was far too high up in the mix, its sound a little too harsh for the music it was playing (I did overhear the drummer remark, incidentally, at the end of the show that he was playing a new Yamaha kit with rather thin wooden shells); I wanted to be listening to the music, not thinking about the instruments. But there just wasn’t quite enough in the music to keep my attention. And I wasn’t alone — the audience that had filled the floor around the stage at the Tuning Fork when Arrowsmith came on stage started thinning out around half an hour into the show; by the time she was playing her last couple of numbers, barely forty-five minutes later, the sound of conversation at the bar was almost as loud as the music from the PA.

A shame, that — the highpoint of Holly Arrowsmith’s set came at the very end, shortly before 11pm.   Farewell — “a brand-new song, I’ve never played it in public before” was another Holly-only number, but for possibly the only time in the evening, she allowed herself to dig deep inside herself, and when she did, her voice had a raw energy that raised the song into the realms of the genuinely remarkable. A half-hearted call for an encore went unheeded; she left the stage at the end of the show sounding, to my ears, just a tiny bit disheartened as she thanked the audience.

Skyscraper Stan will be back at the Tuning Fork on 10th October to kick-start their Southern Fork Americana festival with the Commission Flats. I’ll be there. I don’t think, on the strength of tonight’s show, that Holly Arrowsmith would see me in another of her audiences.

Steve McCabe

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