The worst of the heatwave has passed through London by the time Bill Callahan rolls into town, but it’s still sweltering in Earth’s cavernous art deco theatre. It’s packed in here, too: 720 people squeezed in to witness one of America’s finest living songwriters play a rare solo show as part of a European summer run. A handful will be lucky enough to pick up one of the custom T-shirts Callahan is selling at the merch stall for £40 – plain, off-white shirts that he writes on before each show. On the last one left, he’s written “River Guard” across the front in black marker pen, the title of one of his most powerful songs, from 1999’s Knock Knock. Someone snaps it up. Seems like a good deal.
The size of venue feels right for this stripped-back show. The sole focus is Callahan, in green shirt and blue trousers, playing a white electric Fender and a hi-hat he operates with his left foot while his right activates a subtle kick from an array of pedals. A few years back he struggled to fill Hammersmith Apollo with a full band, but last September his four-night residency at the ICA with drummer Jim White went down a storm. This show is pure, undiluted Callahan, hypnotic and intense, as this great interpreter of dreams explores the human condition in that laconic baritone, his words ripe with wonder and subversion.
Callahan turned 59 last month and has a young family to look after, which might explain his desire to hit the road three years after his last album YTILAER, touring a solo performance with minimal overheads. It’s still a captivating spectacle – it’s tempting to cast him as the Gen X Leonard Cohen, given his deep catalogue and devoted fanbase – though you sense this is very much work for him, clocking in for an 80-minute shift. “What time is it?” he asks after he’s played “Rock Bottom Riser”. “10.40pm,” someone shouts. “OK. Wonderful to be here, thank you all for coming,” he says, putting his guitar down and walking off. There’s no encore.
Before that, he glides fairly serenely through 16 songs which amount to a Callahan best-of, taking in Smog staples such as “Cold Blooded Old Times”, “Teenage Spaceship” and “Red Apples”. On “Let’s Move To The Country”, another from Knock Knock, the record he made after his break-up with Chan Marshall, he adds a new line – “Pretty woman in a petticoat”, to pair with “live with a monkey and a goat” – then returns to his eternal source of inspiration: “Off to sleep we go / To the land that we don’t know.” As he sings on “Coyotes”: “They say never wake a dreamer – maybe that’s how we die.”
When Callahan reduces his material to its essence in this way – his sinuous guitar playing is treated with effects – you’re confronted with the stark brilliance and bleak beauty of his songs. There’s the prison warden wrestling with his conscience in the opener “Jim Cain”. On the next song, “747”, he sings of seeing “stock footage of heaven” after waking up on a plane. And then he seeks to divine meaning from his place in the natural order of things, his lyrics rich with symbolism as he tucks into the frontier blues of “The Well” and “Say Valley Maker”.
In addressing universal themes, Callahan bridges the ancient and the modern – many of his songs might’ve been written a hundred years ago – and you feel he’s part of a lineage of cosmic Americana sketched out by Cormac McCarthy and David Lynch, visionaries who mapped out their own realities, whose stories are laced with magic realism. “This place feels real nice – like my first gigs in London a long time ago,” he says. The old times were good for Callahan too, but now he’s lived his experiences, he’s rarely sounded better.
SET LIST
1 Jim Cain
2 Eid Ma Clack Shaw
3 747
4 Cold Blooded Old Times
5 Ride For The Feeling
6 Coyotes
7 Teenage Spaceship
8 Partition
9 Cowboy
10 Natural Information
11 Red Apples
12 Say Valley Maker
13 The Well
14 Let’s Move To The Country
15 In The Pines
16 Rock Bottom Riser
