Martin Longley got sprayed with beer, heckles and distorto-feedback, all in the name of rockaboogie.
Benjamin Booker
O2 Academy
September 6th
Usually, audience demographics are spread closely in line with the age of a performer, but such things were not predictable at Stateside bluesman Benjamin Booker’s gig. Although born in Virginia, this 25-year-old singer/guitarist now dwells deep down in New Orleans, adopting many of the traits commonly exhibited by gnarled oldsters three times his age.
The crowd in the venue’s smallest room (Academy 3) looked to be three-quarters in the forties-and-above age range, with the remainder being around the late-teens or early-20s mark. Curious. Or maybe not so much, as Booker only uses blues as his beginning point, adopting the low-down swampy Fat Possum grind of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough et al, going right back to Lightnin’ Hopkins.
His actual delivery involves a pumped-up recent-rock pace and songwriting tack, loading in the White Stripes and the Black Keys, driven with a manic energy, lashed with distortion, feedback and general critical overloading. Hence the more youthful pockets in the audience, possibly picked up via his opening-slot stint for Jack White.
None of this matters much. If only every gig featured an uncategorisable audience along with its uncatgeorisable music. Hey, there was even a significant moron element voicing its presence at the show! This was a tumorous growth in the crowd that seemed to be well into Booker, but had a perverse means of displaying this, shouting out during his quieter sections, and snorting comments that were on the border of being insulting. Maybe they’d only heard a song or two, maybe they’d been guzzling beer all day.
Booker was backed by bassist Alex Spoto and drummer Max Norton, the latter imbued with a particularly hell-for-leather compulsion to reach the end of each song, smashing and slamming with an exhilarating degree of hard-hitting energy. The leader demands such extremity, to match his own cranked-up rifferama. The trio mostly opted for a thundering wall of sound, an accelerated boogie that teetered on the divide between hard roots and even harder rock.
Sometimes the tunes didn’t match up to the vigour, and the rolling didn’t prompt too much in the way of either headbanging or fleet footwork, but most of the crowd probably felt like standing there and adopting an eye-of-the-hurricane stillness. An effective mid-set tactic was for Spoto to swap bass guitar for fiddle, and for Norton to pick up a mandolin.
At first, Booker downed his guitar, and matters got really minimal, then for a second number, he picked up his axe again, and offered a more trundling aspect of this downhome section of the evening. Then it was a return to the core rockaboogie sound, until what seemed like maybe the 40 minute point, where they’d exhausted the contents of the debut album.
Then, Booker launched into an extraordinary instrumental extravaganza that took the set almost up to the hour mark. This was more indebted to Jimi Hendrix and The Stooges, as he began to rip out the full howling capacities of his guitar, whanging it around to shape feedback, cranging it down on the floor, stepping on it and hammering a beer can on its strings. The climaxes rose and fell, with bass and drums working closely in their dynamic improvisation.
Meanwhile, Booker was perched on the frontal stage barrier, teetering back into the arms of the crowd. After just distributing the band’s backstage beer, shaking up a can and spraying them, he suddenly toppled, guitar in hand, soloing crazily as he rolled on the sea of welcoming hands. The venue’s regulatory signs threaten immediate expulsion for crowd-surfers, but Booker was thankfully immune to such punishment. M
usically, things were getting deranged. Here was the full excitement hinted at in the songs, but now delivered with a feeling of genuine unhinged uncertainty. Perhaps they do this at every gig, or maybe this is some fresh area of exploration. After 15 or 20 minutes, the tension was still tight, the rock’n’roll scream arcing right up there at its highest level.