He comes from a long line in history of dreamers. He ain’t your saviour, or your Christ, or your goddamn sacrifice. He’s been sober three years, on the road nine months, and we’ve been spellbound to these kind of words and whispers and moans and Texan drawls for damn near to an hour and forty-five minutes, give or take a goat joke.
Fair enough, that’s too much, too fast. Let’s recap. Back in March, Josh T. Pearson’s stunning debut ‘Last of the Country Gentlemen’ caught us all with our trousers down, completely unprepared for this kind of brutal opening-up of old wounds, wrought with the kind of shattering sincerity and frankness unseen since the days of Johnny Cash.
Now, sat in the Royal Northern College of Music’s concert hall of octagons and semi-circles and incredible organ pipes, Pearson strides out to join us, dressed head to foot in black with a silver steer skull belt buckle. Good god, the man’s tall. “Anyone gotta pee? Turned off your cellphones? Don’t be that asshole.” He takes the time to get a feel for this audience; charming and beguiling us with his easy manner and inexhaustible supply of dirty jokes while he tunes up his guitar.
He invites anyone who fancies it to come sit up front with him. Nobody. Then a girl takes up the offer, coming down the aisles to sit cross-legged this side of the invisible sound line. Pearson growls a little growl, raising his big ol’ eyebrows at the sight of Joss, his bold new front-row fan.
Things get serious with ‘Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ’, that guilt-ridden ode to worshipping the wrong kind of man, and being that man. Fingers glide over guitar strings in waterfall motion, picking and strumming and punishing that instrument into giving out tender, soulful vibrations. His technique is a delight for the eyes, stirring up visions of Booker White slappin’, tappin’ and slidin’ his way through the ‘Aberdeen Mississipi Blues’.
It takes guts to write a song like ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’. What it takes to sing it aloud to strangers night after night, only Josh T. Pearson can know. These words are whispers of regret, roars of pain and old rage, bringing up vivid images of drunken violence as he warns “Don’t make me rule this home with the back of my hand” in a voice fit to freeze your blood and break your heart.
Half a lifetime later, he stamps his boot and that’s the song done. These songs are heavy stuff; naturally, he lightens the mood, calling out the people who just have to nip out for a bathroom break, wolf-whistling the ladies cutting across the stage floor in front of him. He chats up the ladies in the front row, desperate not to have attention called to them. He tells them the joke about the duck and the pig. Except now it’s the goat and the pig. Manchester’s more into goats, by his reckoning. “Worst part about goat-fuckin’? You gotta go all the way ‘round to the front to give it a kiss.”
This entire review easily could have ended up being about his considerable talent for quickfire stand-up comedy, if it weren’t all eclipsed by his phenomenal presence as a musician. This playful banter with the audience and the cool kids up top and Joss who won’t hold hands with Rowan who came to sit up front all leads into ‘Sorry With A Song’ and ‘Country Dumb’, each piece offering up another ten or fifteen minutes of mesmeric country confessional balladry. This is a man singlehandedly breathing bright, glowing, fluttering new life into the well-worn solo guitar act, and he’s not even finished astounding us yet.
Rounding off the set, he builds us up with Boney M’s reggae spiritual ‘Rivers of Babylon’. Then he lets us down gently with the cathartic calm of his own inimitable ‘Thou Art Loosed’, tilting his grizzly bearded face back to catch the spotlight. He’s not putting us on or playing holier than thou; we just spent an evening listening to him washing his dirty laundry all over the fretboard.
The man’s driving it all out of himself, and right or wrong, it’s music to the ears.
