Hannah Wysome (gig: 22/02/06) Folks’ style was prefaced by the night’s compere as ‘come down music’; you can never be sure of the benefits of billing a band as the aural equivalent of tranquilisers, but after their first couple of tunes, you’d have been hard pressed to quibble.
Folks have got a good front man in Scotty Anderson. He’s got a fair bit of charisma and excellent tambourine action - it’s a deceptively difficult instrument to master - but his back-up from the other guys just wasn’t there.
It’s like the singer had wanted to start a new band but had found that his pals had already been snapped up by Polytechnic and he’d had to make do with the try-hards who were fine strumming away in their bedrooms but couldn’t cope with anyone looking at them while they did it.
The result is that they’re left with a blandly delivered set of over-earnest Mike & the Mechanics/Stereophonics/Rod Stewart worst hits that, at best, could produce one track worthy of consideration for the Cold Feet incidental music.
You kind of feel sorry for Anderson, grooving away like the unpricked sausage in a stale hot dog, whilst his axe-men point despairingly at their monitors; sadly no amount of sound guy trickery is going to make their chord progressions more exciting.
