First, the negative bit! I hope that this won’t cause any upset to any Prestonians out there, but unfortunately I’d have to say that The Guildhall is my least favourite of all the venues we’ve seen Ralph in over the years! The auditorium is huge, with an extremely high roof, and is set out in what seemed a slightly odd way. Immediately in front of the stage there are a few dozen rows of seats flat on the floor, and behind them a larger raked area of seating. They obviously sell tickets for these banked seats first, as they were almost all taken, and then go on to sell the un-raked ones at the front, the front few rows of which were also full. Despite what it said on their website about it only being possible to book 9 tickets, there were, unusually for a Ralph gig, a number of empty rows at the back of the flat area. As a result, the majority of the audience was quite some distance from the stage, then there was a band (about 5-6 rows) of almost empty seats, then another 6-7 rows immediately in front of the stage that were mostly full. Throughout the show the lighting was only dimmed, not really dark at all, so the empty area was very obvious. I wondered how Ralph felt about the majority of the audience being so far off behind this empty area. (The empty spaces seemed particularly odd as when I rang to book tickets a couple of months ago they said that there were no seats near the front left, so we were sitting about 5 rows from the front of the raked area). There were also 5 very bright emergency exit signs at the front, plus two brightly lit corridors leading from the auditorium which just seemed an additional irritation. I realise, of course, the need for such lights, but having so many all around the stage area seemed, perhaps, a bit of a flaw in the design. Whether it was the high roof, or the empty spaces I don’t know, but for a modern theatre the acoustics seemed very poor too.
Right – that’s got the negative bits out of the way – now onto the positive – the very positive! It goes without saying that Ralph was, as ever, brilliant.
There are no ‘wings’ as such to the stage at Preston, so at 7.35 the little door below and to the side of the stage opened, and Ralph came out, climbed the steps to the stage, picked up a 6 string Gibson and began. The set list was:
Walk Into The Morning – which he began by explaining that it was a song specially written as a starting song.
Summer Girls – Ralph spoke about how much he enjoys the sound of DT’s work even though he feels that he frequently doesn’t really understand it.
The Pretty Brighton Belle – (12 string) - Apparently Ralph remembers nothing about his ride on the footplate with his Granddad, but can remember clearly details like the pattern on his mother’s maternity dress when he was 18 months’ old, and the colour of the egg cups in the kitchen at the same time. He spoke about memories being both a blessing and a curse at times.
Weather the Storm – Back to the 6 string. A request from a couple who’d come all the way from Scotland for the gig, and for whom Ralph requested a round of applause.
(At about this point, Ralph asked Donard to make some adjustments which improved the sound quality quite considerably, despite the flat sounding acoustics of the room.)
After Rain – described as a continuation of the weather theme from the previous song.
Until this point the back of the stage had been lit with muted red lights, giving a sort of striped effect with the blue backing curtain, but now these lights were switched off. This happened just as Ralph picked up the National. Whether it was supposed to indicate a sort of mood change to go with the change of instrument (though as Ralph said, it’s like an old tin dustbin, and probably better described as an implement than an instrument), or whether it was just a coincidence I don’t know. This left him with a very bright spotlight above his head which somehow cast shadows over his eyes and face making it look as if he had black eyes or dark glasses on and a dark area around his mouth – most unflattering!
After a brief explanation about the influence his blind, black, dead musical heroes have had on his music, he went on to talk about how a National Guitar differs from an acoustic one. Then he explained that acoustic guitarists will talk about how (puts on that pseudo-serious voice he uses at times) the tone of the guitar will change and mellow with age, but said that ‘this old bin’ never changes.
Georgia Bound – preceded by the story of how the homesick workers came to write/sing this sort of song.
Guitar ShuffleHesitation Blues – with a description of the time he met Rev Gary Davies. Apparently Ralph learnt this song entirely by ear just by listening to it on a juke box a few times.
A Feather Fell – Interestingly, one of the lines in the chorus has changed. Instead of ‘…hate was tattooed on his left hand, and his picking hand said love’, he now sang ‘No message on his left hand, but his picking hand said love. I’ve just looked in Time’s Poems, and this second version is the one on the book, but we’ve never heard him sing these words before. Back to the six string for this one. Somewhere round about now the backing lights came back on and the bright light was slightly dimmed, so we could see him properly again
Wino and The Mouse – Never heard this one live before. Ralph talked about his busking days in Paris which of course linked this to the previous song. Having explained about the mouse being dipped in the glass of cold water, he suddenly paused. ‘I’m sorry’, he said, ‘I’d forgotten this was a hard Northern audience. When I tell people about that down South, they all go “ahhh”, but up here you probably just think “so what, it’s just a mouse”.’ When he spoke about the mouse dancing over the finger holes to get warm, there was very loud “ahhh”, and a big grin from Ralph, who said ‘that’s right, you’re allowed to go “ahhh” now!”
Jesus WeptWhen They Were Young – Ralph chatted about writing AFAICT, and the new songs that went with it.
Ralph introduced the next song by talking about how many radio interviews he’s done over the 40-odd years of his career, and how he can always sense that a question about a certain subject is coming up. He said that he finds it exasperating that 400 or so songs later people nearly always come back to the same one. He feels that that these other songs, plus years of performing live since then should show people that he’s totally uninterested in ‘making hits’ and in going over and over that one ‘blip’ in his career, but many interviewers just don’t seem to get the message. He didn’t mention the name of the song concerned, so neither will I!
First and Last Man – ‘Been there, seen it, bought the shopping bag’ – it seems that he dislikes having to plug the bags!
Run Johnny Run – back to the 12 string, and a mention of how he likes to change words and vary tunes, even many years after writing them.
This was the last song of the main set. Encore –
The Mermaid and the Seagull – Don’t think we’ve ever heard this one live before either, I really liked the additional – not sure what to call them – vocals? Humming? Gentle whistling?
A wonderful evening was made even more wonderful by Ralph’s announcement that he would be coming to the bar afterwards for a signing session.
We went back out to the bar where we continued the conversation with Leighton & Sue that we’d begun before the show. (Just to balance out the complaints, I liked the bar very much – there was plenty of room yet it still felt cosy somehow). Ralph came out with a handful of pens – one for plastic CD cases, a silver one for the bags, one for writing on shiny CD inserts, and one for signing books, and we ended up chatting about memories again, as we talked about the army buildings in Oswestry, (which is not far from where we live), which seemed to bring us back to what he’d said in the show about memories being a blessing and a curse. We passed our camera to Leighton, and for the first time in 18 or so years of going to Ralph gigs had our photo taken with him – a perfect end to a lovely evening.
Incidentally, I heard someone in front of us in the queue at the end say to Ralph ‘I thought you weren’t doing these meeting sessions any longer’, to which Ralph replied something along the lines of ‘well, it seems I am now’ – I wonder if that means he intends to go on doing them sometimes – I hope so, even if he can’t do them at every gig. Thinking about it, he seems to be ensuring that even though these meeting sessions don’t happen at every show, those that he does do are spread around the country. As we hoped when this discussion first arose, he seems to have struck a sort of happy medium between not meeting people at all and not feeling obliged to do so every time – should have known he’d find a way! Thanks Ralph.
Naomi
