Songcraft and dazzling virtuosity from an old-fashioned guitar god
To suggest that John Mayer is the missing link between Paul Simon and Jimi Hendrix might be going too far, but only just. The 41-year-old American singer-songwriter has an unusual combination of talents, at once sensitive troubadour and blazing guitar god. Ed Sheeran crossed with Eric Clapton barely covers it.
A big star in the US, Mayer has won seven Grammy awards, yet they tend to be for things like Best Pop Vocal Performance: his studio albums emphasise melodious songcraft in the vein of James Taylor rather than, say, Slash. Mayer has a soft, soulful easy-going baritone croon that rises to tender falsetto, gently negotiating ballads about heartache, ditties about relationship travails and singalongs about the politics of idealism. A good-looking guy with a wry line in comic patter, he has been romantically linked to singers and actresses more famous than him, including Jennifer Aniston, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.
He has also been touring with surviving members of the Grateful Dead, taking over the role of late guitar great Jerry Garcia. It would be a bit like James Blunt turning up as the new frontman for ZZ Top. Yet somehow, in his own live sets, Mayer has offered a seamless blend of these apparently disparate talents.
Clearly, a lot of people here already know how great Mayer is. On the first of two sold-out nights at London’s O2 Arena, he played two sets with an intermission. “I’ve only had, like, two and a half hits,” he acknowledged, thanking the audience for being so receptive to a set featuring 24 songs from seven albums spanning 18 years. “Here’s another song that went absolutely nowhere.” But when he started up recent single I Guess I Just Feel Like (which barely scraped into the top 100 in the US, and failed to chart in the UK), the 20,000-strong audience cheered as if he had pulled a long-lost classic out of the bag.
Backed by a fantastic eight-piece band, Mayer allowed songs to flow and build from often quite intimate beginnings until choruses reached pressure points from which his sinuous and sometimes explosive solos offered powerful release. Eric Clapton has hailed him a master, and Clapton’s downtempo soft rock has definitely been an influence. But there are touches of the sweet tone of BB King, the rhythmic funkiness of Hendrix, the florid attack of Stevie Ray Vaughan and soulful syncopation of Steve Cropper.
Mayer has an ear for a melodious sequence of notes, and a great sense of dynamics. And, frankly, his acoustic dexterity may be even more impressive than his electric playing, stripped of sustain effects and reliant on dazzlingly nimble fretwork. He picked out simultaneous bass and lead parts on the jazzy Neon, a song from 2001 debut album Room for Squares. It was thrown in only at the last minute due to repeated audience requests, despite Mayer jokingly grumbling: “I don’t want to do it!” Given the level of technical difficulty, it was easy to understand his reluctance about tackling it unrehearsed, but by halfway through he was grinning and yelling: “I wanna play this! I wanna!”
This was a very old-fashioned rock show, with no backing tracks, no miming and no special effects other than a big screen showing close-ups of players. It was all about meaningful songs and amazing musicianship. “To play a note and just hold it and have this band come swirling and cascading underneath, it’s like flying,” said Mayer, appreciatively. When live performance is this good, everyone is lifted up.