Truth Caravan

Cool as folk - Alistair Goodwin Band - Is uncool the new cool? Is cello the new rock guitar? Are big holey jumpers the new naked? While the rest of us have been working for the man, dodging the rent and waiting for the first Big Brother beheading, Alistair Goodwin has been seeking the answers to these fundamental questions. His answer seems to be the sonic equivalent of finding yourself naked at a festival at 5am in a champagne Jacuzzi with a naked Brazilian girl you’ve never seen before handing out free hard-boiled eggs – a bit strange at first, but definitely a long way the right side of good. The line-up of singer-guitarist, heavy metal cello, punk bass and jazz drums played on a Peruvian fish box might sound like something your dad gets all embarrassing over after a couple of real ales, but Alistair has a canny way with a tune and the nu-skiffle arrangements somehow result in bared-soul angst you can actually dance to. He seems a bit shy at first and I’m worried the hard-drinking denizens of The Hobbit, Southampton are going to start ordering the throwing lager. But then he launches into a shiver-up-the-spine, stripped down piece of tormented acoustic-guitar-and-voice genius, and before you know it the audience is drawn into his own fractured psyche. And Alistair’s world is a dark place. Cornwall, probably. Somewhere where you live in a lighthouse, somewhere where wearing a big jumper makes sense, somewhere bleak where the sun is absent, all the neighbours are backward, and there ain’t much to do but contemplate big questions and pine for lost loves. By the time the rest of the band joins him there are grown men dancing and crying into their beer AT THE SAME TIME. Tonight’s songs are a mix of old and new material, and highlight Alistair’s progression as a truly original songsmith. He’s clearly been partying with Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake at Woody Guthrie’s graveside. Just when you think things couldn’t get any more intense, Nigel Rippon – apparently an “actual wizard”, equipped with an electric cello that looks like a spaceship – cranks it up with a head-twistingly endless supply of sounds never before made on any instrument. Using a box of electronic trickery and more than a smidgen of old-fashioned instrumental talent, he grafts bits of Hendrix, Rodrigo and the Doctor Who theme into the mix like a musical Steven Hawking. It’s all tied together by an urgent, hard-edged rhythm section who refuse to let things descend into mere muso noodling. By the last number – which seems to be a re-working of a 1970s TV theme – there are drunk guys dancing with the band while Alistair has gone all Joe Cocker and looks like he’s about to go flying off his stool. There’s a weird alchemy going on. This home-made music just shouldn’t be good. Maybe in the morning we’ll all be wondering how come we were dancing to what, on paper, sounds like dad music. But in the here and now, preconceptions like that just don’t make sense, and getting down to quirky-English-folk-gone-bad does. Apparently, Dad can dance.