Like The Hold Steady, Drive-By Truckers take the sound of mainstream American rock and add a big dollop of literary nous. Desperate to overturn the notion that Southerners are a bunch of gator-wrestling, tobacco-chewing inbreds, their Southern-fried country rock albums are more like mini-operas than your average meat-and-potatoes rock bands could ever imagine. Plus, they’ve always worked hard to build a fanbase online, as well as touring, and that’s in evidence tonight. I haven’t seen a hardcore set of fans like this since Mastodon, and what’s more, they are tall. Very tall. Being over six foot myself, I felt like a normal person (although I had to apologise to the guy behind, who thankfully was seeing them the next night as well, and wasn’t too fussed that I’d blocked his view. They are that kind of band). Lovely fans too; the rapport between them and the band was clear to see, with the fans singing along – for once, not an irritant, more a validation that their tales of Southern woe have resonated with people from all walks of life.

Without meaning to descend into cliché, this is the sort of music that if it came on the radio as you were driving along a state road in one of the sweltering, humid states, as the night starts to finally cool, with your arm hanging out of the window and the lightning flickered on the horizon, would make you damned happy. Now, in the interests of total disclosure, I’ve only got one of their records (the 2001 magnum opus Southern Rock Opera, which is as good a place to start as any). So coming to see DBT was more an exercise in finding out if they really are as good live as people say, as opposed to hearing live versions of songs that I love. Would they be the finely-honed Southern Rock Gods that I’d heard about?

Look, My Camera Is Rubbish, Please Stop Moving

The answer to that came in two songs, “The Fourth Night of My Drinking” and the follow up “Get Downtown”. The first sounds like the result of a drinking contest between The Hold Steady and REM, and the other is the kind of country-rock hoedown in which each band member gets to do a little solo. It goes without saying that both were utterly mesmerising; these boys (and gal) know exactly what they are doing, and the years of touring ensure that they do it damn well. So I’d say, without going into much detail about the rest of the songs (that I don’t know), that they goddamn rock. “Hell No I Ain’t Happy” thundered along with its tales of touring woes. “(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So”, one of bassist Shona’s songs, a country rock stomper like The Jayhawks and the like used to make, got people singing along – not bad for a song from the new album.

Later on, Patterson Hood tells us all about the old Country Soul dude Eddie Hinton, and the band dive into two of his numbers. As you’d expect, they are superb, especially “Everybody Needs Love”, which leaves us all with stupid grins on our faces, band included. Sadly, we had to duck out before the encore, but those stupid grins stayed on our faces until well after we got home.

So, good gig? Yeap. The South might not rise again, but if they did, I’d rather these guys at the vanguard than those Tea Party crazies. Tales of Southern life – warts, poverty and all – told over great rock’n’roll. You know, I think I’ll be buying me some of their records and get myself back into their music. Isn’t that what live music should do?

Note: Track names taken from the marvellous One Of These Days.

MP3: The Southern Thing by Drive By Truckers

Buy “The Big to Do” (CD/MP3)

How Grandaddy never became successful is beyond me. Great tunes; intelligent lyrics about love, life and the struggle between nature and technology; a charmingly unpretentious band who gave the distinct impression they were just a bunch of mates who got together to form a band whilst skateboarding, all wrapped up with a slightly shambolic air of second-hand guitars and analogue synths. They sounded just different enough to be unique without being too challenging. Yet the world wasn’t quite ready for their tales of dogs, AM radio stations, broken-down robots and office workers gone astray on activity day outs. Breaking up in 2006, Jason Lytle has continued touring as a solo artist (often taking some of the band on tour with him), but their legacy is slowly mouldering in a forest surrounded by broken washing machines.

Which is what leads me to the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen to watch Jason perform to what can only be described as an adoring crowd. Maybe they all feel the same as me – that he’s an unfairly forgotten genius – and have set out this evening to give him love. Or rather, make him feel loved, as I’m not sure he’d want to hook up with many of the beardy, “I work in IT” crowd here tonight¹. At times, Jason appears rather embarrassed by the whole thing; a modest, retiring fellow by nature, he seems equally baffled and scared by the shouts of “We love you!” and “You’re a genius”. Admittedly though, later on, the number of wags in the crowd shouting “get on with it!” increases, to general laughter.

Other than the love, what shines through is that Jason Lytle really is quite special. Whilst his guitar playing isn’t up to the stellar likes of, say, Sam Beam, his knack of writing songs that hit you as much in the heart as in the head is thrown to the fore when it’s just him, an acoustic and the occasional drum machine/sequencer thing. Without all the trappings of a band, vintage synths and all, you’d expect songs like “Now It’s On” and “I’m On Standby” to suffer without the squelchy noises, multi-tracked vocals and power chords, but they come across remarkably well. Always a sign of good songwriting that. Indeed, Jason even makes a joke of the bits missing, one time asking for the crowd to make “a sound like a swarm of bees buzzing around inside a motorcycle helmet”, another time laughing at the crowd filling in the “aaaahs” between his lines. “Hewlett’s Daughter” – possibly one of the finest songs of the Naughties – features a couple of bars of a thrashed acoustic guitar, which fails to break the magic of the song, and when he repeats the trick shouting “Slayer!”, gets the requisite laughs.

It’s a loving crowd alright. New songs, bashfully introduced, get a rapturous round of applause at their culmination. A long story about how he’s going to be snowed in for months which will give him time to write about three new albums is greeted with the response “Good!”. And a couple of the new songs really do sound promising. Older Grandaddy songs are played to a combination of rapturous awe, and then some gentle singing along, until at the gig’s end, a rendition of “(Chilean) Miner at the Dial-A-View” manages to be heartbreakingly poignant and comical, what with the singing along and Jason’s attempts at a female voice.

There’s a surprising amount of old material too, like “Levitz” and “El Caminos In The West”, both excellent, and even the less accessible songs from The Sophtware Slump like “Chartsengrafs” and “Beautiful Ground”. The latter is, as you’d expect, beautiful, with Jason showing off his really rather nice voice. Indeed, I’d forgotten what a lovely voice he has, swallowed as it normally is under echo and reverb and whatnot. Alone with a guitar, it really shines.

At the end of the night, one is left with the distinct impression that, this coming winter, he’ll be holed up in a snow-bound shack, writing new songs with his old acoustic and a drum machine, and occasionally will stop and think “I hope that lot in London will like this one”. We probably will, old chap. The missus had to miss this gig as she was looking after our poorly kid, and she’s very grumpy about it. Can’t say I blame her.

¹ Full Disclosure – I work in IT too.

MP3: Everytime I’m With You by Sparklehorse (feat Jason Lytle)

MP3: El Caminos In The West by Grandaddy

MP3: Rollin’ Home Alone by Jason Lytle

Buy “Yours Truly, The Commuter” (CD/MP3)

Buy Sparklehorse’s “Dark Night Of The Soul” (CD/MP3)

Amazon’s Grandaddy Store