The music was fine, Shaky, but we needed more memories
It’s a question that has vexed me for almost a decade. For whom did I feel more sympathy at Glastonbury 2008? The lads who carried an actual wooden green door to the front of the crowd to hold aloft when Shakin’ Stevens played Green Door only for the Welsh Elvis not to play the 1981 hit? Or for Shaky himself, for putting out lovingly crafted albums of new music, only for his audience to want the decades-old hits?
On the basis of Stevens’s show at Southend, that conundrum of audience expectation versus artistic expression remains unresolved. His new album, Echoes of Our Times, is a brooding slab of swampy Americana. Featuring harmonica and banjo, it explores his family history with songs inspired by the Cornish copper mine in which his grandfather worked and the agonising death of his Uncle Leonard in the Ypres trenches. It’s a good album. It reached 22 in the charts. And yet for all this, you felt that the audience – like those Glastonbury door-luggers – were waiting for the UK’s best-selling singles artist of the Eighties to play his rockabilly hits about coloured portals, Ole Houses and Lipstick, Powder and Paint. They were there, but the evening’s musical oscillations, coupled with a curious lack of stage presence from Stevens, made for a flat show.
He opened with Down in the Hole, the copper mine song, its throbbing beat echoing the sound of hammer on metal. It was bracing stuff, tempered by his voice being a bit, well, shaky and his off-putting tendency to face the drum riser during solos.
The hits came. Turning Away, Hot Dog and Marie Marie brought a feelgood vibe. But the evening’s stylistic dilemmas were crystallised in This Ole House, his best-known song. It was given a mid-paced Delta blues makeover. Fine. But it felt a little like painting a Rubik’s Cube black for the hell of it.
Perhaps it wasn’t really about the music at all. I just wanted more of the memories. This was Shaky. The man who did the air splits wearing double denim and white trainers on Top of the Tops. The man whose early career attracted John Peel’s attention and whose band, The Sunsets, opened for the Rolling Stones on 1969’s Let It Bleed tour. The man who attacked Richard Madeley on a sofa on live TV, prompting fellow guests Status Quo – hardly known for their own self-restraint – to call him “mad”. Shaky’s 69 now. The splits would be ridiculous. But I wanted a flavour of that ride, and I got little.
What I did get in the encore was Green Door. And at least I didn’t have to take one with me. Until May 28. Tickets: ticketmaster.co.uk