“If anyone’s awake during this there’ll be trouble,” says Brush Shiels, introducing a lullaby – and a grin – midway through son Jude’s good-natured, gently shambolic but nothing less than exhilarating album launch (of sorts).
One says ‘of sorts’ for, although this was a chance for the masses to hear the songs from Jude’s exquisite recent Without Silence debut, with Brush as MD they have already been radically reworked. Keys, tempos and instrumentation have all changed. From an album coccooned in the New York cool-jazz sound of Chet Baker, we now find a sonic butterfly cascading around a hitherto-unknown territory between King Crimson, flamenco, Hank Williams and gypsy jazz. It’s a whole new genre that we might call progressive-rock-skiffle.
And, like any unknown pleasure, the discovery is a joy. With Grant Nicholas on snare drum and cymbal (a combination on which something akin to Ginger Baker’s ‘Toad’ was nevertheless still possible) and Brush, seated throughout, on rhythm guitar, Jude fronted the band with an amplified €9 nylon string guitar – on which he soared, like Django Reinhardt careering on the cliff of Coltrane-esque atonality without ever falling off it.
The sound was visceral, left-field and utterly joyous. Despite the incorrigible comic interjections and a few wacky encores, Brush gave his most disciplined performance for years. His was the bedrock on which Jude built his fantastical tower of song.