John Bramwell: The Cluny, Newcastle

John Bramwell
The Cluny, Newcastle
eighth June 2024

Britain’s most interesting musical wordsmith winds up his intensive UK tour with a gig of two halves: darkish songs of consuming and catastrophe from his time with I Am Kloot and harmony-drenched songs of happiness and hope from his solo repertoire.

“Hi there, Geordies!” beams the diminutive, dentally-challenged determine with the mane of gray hair. “I’m going to do the gig tonight on a stool,” he broadcasts, perching along with his acoustic guitar: “John Bramwell – the Val Doonican years.”

He’s nonetheless cackling as he remarks how “scary” it’s that a lot of the equally greying viewers responds to the reference. The Mancunian previously often known as Johnny Dangerously, erstwhile frontman of I Am Kloot, a songwriter as soon as described to me with uncanny accuracy as “the poet laureate of romantic disappointment,” used to presage his performances with the promise of enjoying us “songs of consuming and catastrophe.”

Not any extra.

As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, it’s precisely a decade since Kloot made their triumphant final stand on the 2014 Meltdown Pageant curated by their buddy Man Garvey. As his contented smile confides, John Bramwell right this moment is a really completely different man. A cheerful man in a contented place.

The place as soon as songs just like the outdated Kloot favorite Twist (“There’s blood in your legs / I like you”) and As a result of (“Kill me earlier than you die / ‘Trigger I like you”) delved deep into the darkness and disappointment of dysfunctional relationships and celebrated alcoholic oblivion in songs like Proof (“Might you stand one other drink? / I’m higher once I don’t suppose”) and To The Brink, Bramwell now lives on a barge along with his beloved canine Henry, coming ashore to sing hymns to the pure world expressing the enjoyment of being alive.

Not a lot consuming and catastrophe as happiness and hope; much less fucking and preventing, extra loving and laughter.

Tonight on Tyneside it’s the forty second and ultimate date of a UK tour and Bramwell is demob joyful, which implies he’s mining the Kloot again catalogue earlier than being joined by his new bandmates Dave and Andy Fidler to create the Full Harmonic Trio. However first… he begins on his stool with a solo rendition of Larger Wheels from the primary Kloot album 1 / 4 of a century in the past. “Your dim and dismal love’s gone rotten / Grim and grasping and finest forgotten.”

Not precisely loving and laughter; not but.

No sooner has he completed the primary tune than he’s asserting how happy he’s along with his efficiency to this point, and specifically his guitar enjoying: rightly so, for Bramwell’s delicate fingerpicking is an underrated counterpoint to his extra broadly recognised lyrical prowess. “How a lot was it tonight – £25? I may stroll off now!” The packed viewers laughs nervously as he slides off his stool. But it surely’s all proper. He’s accomplished that joke earlier than – the truth is, we have been there to jot down about it, again in 2021 in Hebden Bridge. We have been there a 12 months later in Northwich, too, when he truly did stroll off and provide a refund.

“The factor about my jokes,” he chuckles, “is that they’re not jokes.”

Bramwell guarantees loads of new songs however earlier than he does that he raids the depths of the Kloot catalogue – We Imagine, To The Brink, I Nonetheless Do, Mouth On Me, 86 TVs and the wonderful From Your Favorite Sky. Amongst them is a tune so new that it hasn’t but been recorded. When The Lights Go Out is a poignant tribute to the late Bryan Glancy, Bramwell’s bandmate in his first group, The Mouth, and a part of a nascent Manchester scene that included Man Garvey and David Grey. Glancy, who died 18 years in the past, was the one who didn’t make it; the one who inadvertently created Kloot by taking an unannounced three-week vacation per week earlier than The Mouth started a tour.

All that appears a very long time in the past when Bramwell is joined in flip by his youthful accomplices Andy Fidler, including light percussion and harmonies, and Andy’s brother Dave on electrical bass and extra harmonies. The singer’s longstanding lyrical leitmotifs – skies and stars – stay however you’d be arduous pressed to think about Bramwell in bygone days, one foot aggressively positioned on a beer crate, singing an uplifting hymn to A World Full Of Flowers – not with out a thorn bringing blood to the floor.

Others corresponding to I Am The Sky, the soppily romantic It’s Simply You and The Mild Implausible have a simplicity and sweetness that owe as a lot to the English Romantic poets as Lennon and McCartney, enhanced by these three-part harmonies that recall Crosby, Stills & Nash; even the Blackpool-born Nash’s earlier band The Hollies. Not that it’s all flowers and sunshine: Bramwell could also be “mendacity on a mattress of roses” however there are ominous portents overhead in A Sky Full Of Thunder And Lightning. They’re by no means distant, like love and catastrophe. “That’s the place the pleasure lies,” he as soon as advised me. “On the crux, simply earlier than the ache.”

Watching him weave between the 2 sides of a repertoire now spanning 30 years, I realise it’s not that he’s modified path – his wondrous method with phrases is undiminished, and the argument for him being Britain’s biggest lyricist stays legitimate – however fairly that his journey has taken a distinct path because the years handed. As he says of his former band: “We by no means cut up up. We simply went on completely different roads. And it felt good.”

However for all that, and for all of the uplifting joie-de-vivre of these new songs, it’s the Kloot basic Northern Skies that will get the entire room singing alongside like a competition crowd with their eyes closed and their arms within the air. And, as closing time approaches, it’s the timeless consuming tune Proof that carries us dwelling into the evening as we be a part of Bramwell to sing a tune that, in its ultimate phrases, poses the largest existential query of all: “Who am I / With out you?”

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Extra of John Bramwell at his web site.

Extra of Tim Cooper’s writing at his Louder Than Battle writer’s archive and at Muck Rack. He posts music each day at EatsDrinksAndLeaves.com.