The Beth things in life

Beth Gibbons
Whichever brain surgeon thought it was a good idea to book the twilight-world swansongs of Beth Gibbons into the nauseatingly humid, litter-and-bodies-strewn, lager-lager-lager-shouting Dance Tent is no damn friend of mine. A several-hundred-strong semicircle of believers, however, ignore the fuckheads with rave-whistles and loudhailers down the back and give Gibbons and her exquisite, deeply moving set – all ’60s-noir-meets-Glen Campbell-meets-John Barry-meets-Tindersticks-meets-‘Moon River’ – their full, enraptured attention. An upright bass, antique-amped jazz guitar, violin, accordion, Spanish guitar and ghostly backing-tracked vocal choruses – comforting but somehow unsettling, like dream-voices – accompany Gibbons’ fragile waver... and she is as tremulous and bent forward and shy as she ever was: cupping the mic with both hands as if it were a lover’s face, and whispering into it as tenderly.