Lucinda Williams
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
ROB ADAMS
WHO says that Americans don’t do irony?
Lucinda Williams will be few people’s idea of a bundle of good cheer, yet there she is on Twitter as @HappyWoman9.
With her Janet Street-Porterplaying-a-Texan-lush drawl, Williams sounds like she’s been world-weary since the world was very young indeed, introducing a selection of songs dedicated to beautiful losers and little rock stars who didn’t hang around long enough to become truly big ones.
She doesn’t sing everything in the same key, although it can sound that way, but there’s a relentlessness in her mood that can be wearing as she moves on to detail what it’s like to be not so much unlucky in love as disappointed in love-making (the polite version of the payoff being: “do you like sex and travel?”) and to change the locks, her hair, everything to get over such disappointments.
Where Williams does, as it were, score for this listener is in her choice of covers and in the chemistry between her and her superb guitarist, Doug Pettibone, and the quietly forceful David Sutton on bass.
There’s something fetchingly elemental about Williams’s churning locomotion on rhythm guitar, and with Pettibone bringing colour – a Stones-at-their-best sting and variety on a series of electric guitars – this gives the music a definite lift.
The best song of the night was the oldest: Skip James’s Depressionera Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, with its distinctive moaning, ah-hah-ing refrain, although Williams’s rather odd introduction to it fell on stony ground.
Bettye Lavette’s Joy ran it close, however, as Williams and Pettibone locked guitars in a manner, if not exactly joyful, then certainly creating considerable heat.