Reviews

With its bottled beers, twinkling blue fairy lights and resigned weary Sunday night air, if you closed your eyes, you could be drinking in a bar deep in the heart of Georgia or Louisiana.

It is not an image dispelled by the arrival of Jim White; a consummate storyteller and a man in possession of a musical back catalogue which makes the very marrow of your bones stand up and pay attention.

Most people are here after watching White in the documentary, Searching For The Wrong Eyed Jesus, where he takes the viewer by the hand and leads them on a glorious, fantastical journey through those strange God-fearing American backwaters that he is lucky enough to call home.

Tonight, it is a lighter hearted and less ideologically-biased White who comes to us, but one who is prepared to slowly yet surely lure you into his bleak and beautiful world.

What grips you so much about the show is just how intimate the whole affair is - he speaks to his audience not from a position of authority, but as an old friend that’s just popped round for a beer and a chinwag. His tales between songs are almost as long as the songs themselves, filled with warmth, wit and the occasional touch of pathos and, if that weren’t enough, at various points, he takes it upon himself to throw out little blocks of inscribed wood he found the night before in a skip at the back of the venue.

When he finally does sing, these are songs from a strange dark heart about how in his town Jesus impersonators drive motorhomes, and all he wants in life is nothing more than to fall in turquoise love with a turquoise girl with a turquoise heart.

In a world where every young upstart who can play three chords on a guitar can act as though the world owes them a living, Jim White stands out like a beautiful curio. This is music not played to gratify a faceless crowd, but more to satisfy a need. Somehow you know that even if there was no one around to hear them, he’d sing these songs anyway.