Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob is taking this rock ‘n’ roll stuff very seriously. So seriously, he’s inviting writers and reviewers into his dressing room for a meet and greet before and after the show. Thornton, like another famous Arkansas son, has the gift of the gab and the gladhandle.

Your reporter, for what it’s worth, gave the man a raccoon penis bone on behalf of JT LeRoy, who thinks he’d make the perfect Le Loup or Glading Grateful in any film adaptation of his book Sarah. Billy Bob sat back, scrutinised the talisman, began to knot the rough leather cord and said, “My brother Jimmy had one of these – swore by it.”

Excuse the rambling, but as Thornton pointed out, in the south it takes half an hour to get directions because the natives insist on embroidering each landmark with a yarn. He told this in character, acting out the pageant of traveller and porch-rat, and the effect was akin to a private audience on a closed set.

The point being, for Billy Bob, spinning yarns is like breathing. He did it all throughout the Vicar St. show, and it proved instrumental in breaking the ice with the crowd, many of whom must’ve come out of freak curiosity rather than any foreknowledge of the Private Radio album. Opinions were divided in the bar afterwards. The fuck-rock-let’s-art crowd thought it too close to cabaret. I disagreed. Much as I would’ve loved to have seen Thornton with a stripped down band playing a backwoods set in half-light, I’m glad we didn’t have to sit through the discomfort of a walk-up mob confused by something as black-oak-knotted as ‘Beauty At The Backdoor’.

Still, the best music came out of those shadows, particularly ‘Starlight Lounge’, when the place fell into a solemn hush. The rest was the album, played by a superior line-up of bar band pros – ‘Walk Of Shame’, ‘Angelina, ‘That Mountain’ – plus a whole cord of ’60s driftwood salvaged from Wayne Fontana And The Mindbenders, The Mamas & The Papas and Gerry And The Pacemakers, not to mention Elvis Costello duetting on ‘Lost Highway’.

Part storytelling session, part chickenwire hootenanny, all southern revue, this was no dilettante’s ball.