| Jon Gomm at the No Name |  Jon Gomm’s guitar bears the scars of his trade. There are forlorn, bald patches where there used to be varnish. This is the result of eliciting percussive responses from his instrument, or to put it another way, beating the crap out of it.
He isn’t alone in doing this. Preston Reed has a similar routine, so did the late Eric Roche. Bottle neck virtuoso Bob Brozman also has an array of tricks used to good effect.
‘I don’t know whether he’s a genius, or a nutter with a resonator,’ wrote one observer of the American.
Gomm played The House Without a Name in Harwood, Bolton on Sunday. The start is delayed and he looks nervous, which is understandable. The No Name (as the locals call it) is an interesting pub. Think of the Slaughtered Lamb from American Werewolf in London and you get the idea.
Seventy years ago Harwood was a rural area as evidenced by a number of stone cottages on the main road outside. These days it’s a sprawl of identikit estates. The homeliest part is the supermarket car park up the road.
‘Are you playing us some music, or what lad?’ asks one of the audience at an appreciable volume. The music starts and blokey looks discomfited and puzzled by it all. Either that or his haemorrhoids are playing up.
The performance begins with a song for Gomm’s Mum. Then he’s into Gloria, a depiction of his first real relationship with a chav (his description) from Blackpool.
‘I remember that kiss, It was a moment of pure bliss..’ he warbles, in a whispery James Blunt kind of way. Do I care. No, I don’t.
Then there’s a cover of Waiting in Vain, followed by a whirring noise. It’s the sound of the Bob Marley revolving in his grave.
The last two paragraphs may have given away that this is not my bag. The phrase ‘style over substance’ keeps popping into my mind, as does the word ‘hype’, although the latter is hardly his fault.
But if I had just the one word to describe this music, it would be ‘ambient’. This is the sort of stuff you’d play to the occupant of a birthing pool, if the cd with whale noises on it had gone missing.
So Jon Gomm’s crap then? No, he isn’t. Tapping the strings, using the body as a drum, or fingering the fretboard from over the top are not new or original ideas, but they’re difficult to master, and he does them well.
But music is supposed to move you and the overall effect (to me anyway) has an emotional intensity that’s similar to that of the speaking clock.
Then again, he has more than his share of admirers, and even in a little pub in Bolton there are people who’ve seen him before and liked what they’ve heard enough to come back for more, at least judging by the number of requests made, so go and see for yourself.
More importantly, take a trip out to the No Name on a Sunday night. The events there are promoted by Cityscape records. You’d normally pay to see these artists on show. Here, they’ll only cost you the price of a drink.
Links
Jon Gomm
Cityscape Records
|
|
|
|
Join us on
 |
 |
|
|
|
Subscribe to North West Rock
