Patrick Watson, Jules Buckley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON

Wyndham Wallace looks back over Patrick Watson’s 20-year career and salutes a catalogue of admirably discreet ambition

Although tonight’s performance is distinguished by the presence of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Jules Buckley, its Creative Artist in Association, it brings Montreal’s Patrick Watson full circle – if only in a sense – back to where his British career began. The country’s music fans most likely first stumbled across him in 2007, when he co-wrote and provided guest vocals on four tracks for Ma Fleur, the third studio album by another imposing ensemble, The Cinematic Orchestra. In those days, he had big shoes to fill: he was following in the footsteps of rapper Roots Manuva, who’d contributed to its 2002 predecessor, Every Day, and was now lining up alongside legendary soul singer Fontella ‘Rescue Me’ Bass – who’d also appeared on that earlier record by Jason Swinscoe’s collective – as well as Lamb’s Lou Rhodes.

Fortunately, Watson is blessed with an angelic voice of unusual delicacy nonetheless suited to works of grandeur and sophistication. At times on those songs he recalled Jeff Buckley, while his falsetto proved as haunting as Thom Yorke’s, and on ‘To Build a Home’, with which he opened the album, he provoked another crucial, if now perhaps outgrown comparison, earning praise in The Guardian for ‘a grand, billowing piano ballad which could draw admiring sighs from Antony Hegarty’ (aka Anohni). Furthermore, he more than held his own against Rhodes, displaying a remarkable sensitivity as they shared microphone duties amid the fragile minimalism of ‘Music Box’.

In the decade and a half since, over the course of a number of bewitching albums – always released under his own name, though he’s insisted for many years that it’s also the name of his band – Watson has developed a voice that is very much his and theirs alone. This refers as much to the manner in which he sings as to the way they write and record. There is, for instance, a peculiarly disarming intimacy in how sometimes he almost sighs his lines, his words like the brush of silk against skin on the title track to 2015’s Love Songs for Robots, while the same song’s climax, with its increasing layers of dreamlike instrumentation, drifts in like mist.

Watson began his career singing and playing keyboards in a ska band called Gangster Politics, then self-released his still only official solo album, Waterproof9, in 2001. Written to accompany a book of photographs by Brigitte Henry, it featured fellow Gangster Politician Simon Angell and Swiss-born Robbie Kuster – as well as Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld on violin – and, joined by Mishka Stein on bass, he, the guitarist and drummer went on to record 2003’s Just Another Ordinary Day together, its title track immediately introducing their singular blend of compassion and tension. Opening as a gentle piano ballad, it’s soon awash with strings, brass and swirls of guitar, yet exercises an elegance and restraint that has characterised much of their most impressive work. That Watson felt the collaboration merited their formally joining him beneath the umbrella of his already established name made sense.

In fact, they’ve been behind all of Patrick Watson’s studio albums since then. Close to Paradise (2006) fought off strong competition from Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and Feist’s The Reminder to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris Prize, and Wooden Arms (2009), which went gold in his homeland, was also nominated for the award. In addition, the underrated Adventures in Your Own Backyard (2012) – described by Uncut as ‘brilliantly adventurous, any time, anywhere’ – made the long list, as did, three years later, Love Songs for Robots, which the same magazine argued confirmed him as ‘a consummate songwriter and master of atmospherics’.

Wave (2019) earned further plaudits for its redemptive nature – it was written after Watson lost his mother and separated from his long-term partner – and was shortlisted for the Canadian Juno Award’s 2020 Adult Alternative Album of the Year, but last year he signalled a subtle change of direction with a three-part piece entitled ‘A Mermaid in Lisbon’. Recorded with New York’s Attacca Quartet, and with the renowned Portuguese singer Teresa Salgueiro (of Madredeus) lending her bell-like voice, it’s breezy yet deeply affecting, and its ingenious arrangements may well give as much indication of what tonight holds as Watson’s early outings on Ma Fleur.

This evening, however, also represents a reunion. Ten years ago, it was Buckley who orchestrated three tracks on Adventures in Your Own Backyard, and they worked together again on Wave. There’s always cause for celebration when Patrick Watson takes the stage but tonight’s show offers another likely landmark on an already cinematic journey. As he sang on Ma Fleur, ‘This is a place where I feel at home’.

_{Wyndham Wallace is the author of Lee, Myself & I: Inside the Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood and can be seen in front of the camera for Almost Fashionable: A Film About Travis (Sky Arts). He is a regular contributor to Uncut and Classic Pop.}