Dave Woodhall watches Daryl Hall and Glenn Tilbrook at Symphony Hall.
Live from Daryl’s House shows what can be achieved without touring. Invite guests to play in a great setting with a tight and talented band, and open your doors to a whole range of performers from KT Tunstall to the O’Jays, Train to Glenn Tilbrook. Which is how the pairing for this Symphony Hall gig came about. Glenn Tilbrook, still relatively fresh from Squeeze’s 50th anniversary outing last year, performing with Daryl Hall’s house band, followed by Daryl Hall headlining, then both back together for the encore.
Glenn Tilbrook undoubtedly still has it. In a sadly brief 45 minutes, he created a careful setlist covering his solo work, Difford and Tilbrook’s Love’s Crashing Waves and Squeeze favourites Black Coffee in bed, Tempted and Hourglass. On his last visit to Symphony Hall, he was struggling with illness but still managed to put on a great show. On this return visit, his voice (and guitar work) was in magnificent form. At one point he said to the audience “I can’t tell you how much fun this is”. The audience clearly agreed. Daryl’s House Band hit a great groove for Tempted, and exited with a long jam for Hourglass featuring plenty of sax.
It was a brave move to allow such a well-known support act to use the headliner’s band, particularly when the audience demographic would have been similar for both, but such a gesture adds to the House Party vibe.
Daryl Hall clearly has a portrait of himself in his attic. Rather like Dorian Gray’s deal with his artist, that portrait is aging, while the man himself springs onto stage looking little different from his Hall and Oates self a half century ago. He opened with The Whole World’s Better but it was the next number, the platinum smash Maneater that first brought out the phones from the audience.
There was a nice blend of old and new, showing that Daryl can still write, even though it’s difficult to accept that so much of his work comes from a period before some of his audience were born. Setlist staples Rich Girl (1977) and Kiss On My List (1980) still sound fresh and crisp, pushed onwards by the House Band’s commitment to the groove. With former members of the Average White Band and Charles DeChant giving it his all on sax, there’s lots to admire here.
There was also a nod to his roots, with the solo hit I’m in a Philly Mood showing the soulful vibe of the city the singer hails from.
Hall made some bittersweet comments about Paul Young’s success with Everytime You Go Away from the album Voices, but Hall and Oates weren’t short on other hits from that period. In fact, Hall and Oates are the most successful US duo ever, which renders the painful split between them even sadder.
Early crowd pleaser Sara Smile highlighted the age of Hall’s voice. While it’s still magnificent – warm, vibrant and powerful – it’s unrealistic to expect the same set of vocal chords to be in play as they were when the single was released in 1975. Other older songs, most notably Rich Girl, which relied on the audience to help out, showed that the voice may not be what it was, but again approaching eighty, we should all be so lucky to sound like this.
Glenn came back for the encore, which featured his own Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Harold Melvin’s Bad Luck, another nod to the Sound of Philadelphia. It was noticeable that these two songs were perhaps the best-performed of the evening.
Earlier reviews from the tour seemed to suggest that apart from vocal limitations, Daryl was having trouble connecting with audiences and was happier performing his new material than the old classics. This certainly didn’t seem the case at Symphony Hall and although I doubt he would have won many new fans based on this performance, the hardcore element of his fanbase, including three women in the front rows who danced throughout and looked likely to occupy the same spot at every venue, wouldn’t have changed a thing.
