Simple Kid / Jeremy Warmsley - Old Blue Last, London
15 Mar 2006

With a name like Jeremy Warmsley, I'm not expecting scuzzy working class punk rock to blast through the floor of the upstairs room in East London's newly refurbished Old Blue Last. Sure enough Jeremy turns up with floppy hair, a smart jacket and a de rigeur Vote for Pedro t-shirt. And what with two pianos and all those major chords going on you can imagine a childhood spent enduring his parent's Richard Clayderman records. Yet behind the melodrama and teenage flamboyance there's a mature songwriter. Many of his songs resemble the laconic, perky stories of Belle and Sebastian, while the excellent Dirty Blue Jeans is like Warmsley's take on The Boomtown Rats' Don't Like Mondays. He is an excellent singer and when he straps on a guitar with the accompaniment of a keyboard player, the songs rock. However when its both of them battering out epic chords it can get too much, like the piano interlude of Bohemian Rhapsody playing over and over again. Still Warmsley is certainly one of the more interesting and different songwriters around at the moment.

The same can be said for Ciaran McFeely, aka Simple Kid, who begins a two month residency at the Old Blue Last tonight. He shuffles onto the tiny stage at one end of the room with so little aplomb that my friend, thinking McFeely was a roadie setting up, heads off on a tactical toilet trip. Without his trademark hat Simple Kid seems a shambolic figure compared to his familiar urban cowboy look. It is a fitting look for a similarly ragged set, mostly comprised of new songs, that is marred by the presence of a malfunctioning backing track. Without his usual band and armed with only a harmonica and a guitar, McFeely relied on his computer to fill in the gaps and was frequently abandoned mid-song. This is actually a good thing for those of us who dislike the use of computer accompaniment to live music and provided one of the gig's highlights when the computer crashed halfway through Truck On. Throwing two fingers to technology, McFeely finished it alone in glorious acoustic. Glitches aside, it is an excellent set and the new material is quality, especially the gloomy philosophy of closing song, Seratonin. Next time he should live up to his name and ditch the computer.

words & photo: Colm Larkin


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