Photos - Eyad BahadiThe Mac(quarie) Hotel, on Wentworth Avenue, happily situated between Sydney central, Hyde Park and the diverse pleasures of Oxford Street, has reinvented itself as a multifaceted venue, focussed around a boutique brewery, food, music, decent accommodation, and more. One of these facets is Raval, a classy lounge almost worthy of high tea, or the Raj. Cosy, relaxed and comfortable, just as the former PM would've wanted it, Raval plays regular host to equally classy, yet edgy live performance. There's really no other venue quite like it and it's a worthy destination in itself. It has a kind of colonial charm and an 'urbane maison' loungeroom ambience. A couple of your very favourite friends and one or two bottles of pinot grigio will almost certainly help you surrender yourself to the performance to follow. Well, it worked for me.
The occasion of my first-ever, long overdue visit was in honour of a redoubtable double-bill: Jen Cloher & Jordie Lane, both of whom hail from Melbourne and must surely stand as two of Australia's most cogent & compelling singer-songwriters.
Their tour blurb touts the lineup thus: 'like fire and ice; moonlight and moonshine; Bonnie and Clyde'. Aha. Sounds good. But which is which? I certainly identify, however, with the pair as 'hot-blooded'. The restraint of Cloher's husky, breathy, beguiling vocal delivery belies her extraordinary capacity to soar and roar like a winter wind, while Lane's heart-on-his-sleeve style isn't a million kilometres from, say, Ron Sexsmith's.
This tour, which also takes in Brisvegas, Adelaide and their hometown, is a boon for those who are fatally-attracted to real, acoustic country, roots, blues, folk and full-blown, heartrending ballads, tales of love, and loss - you need to make a beeline for the cold canyons that are city streets in autumn, to warm your cockles around the warmth these two radiate when you rub up against their considerable songs.
If early reaction is anything to go by, I'm not the only one feasting his or her ears on songs from Cloher's evocatively and intriguingly-titled second album, Hidden Hands, which follows three years after her ARIA-nominated debut, Dead Wood Falls.
Cloher is commonplace on the festival circuit (Woodford, Peats Ridge, Homebake, Queenscliff, East Coast Blues & Roots, Port Fairy, The Falls; you name it) and is already well-known and highly-regarded, if not downright revered, for her tell-it-like-it-is, lyrical robustness, and her new material consolidates that reputation. She's brave in other respects, too: far from formulaic, her latest collection could hardly be more diverse, and there's just a tinge of pop sensibility to ensure memorability: there are hooks to go with her lures. The robustness with words is sublimely counterpointed, at times, by that voice, which could never be called fragile, yet is somehow so imbued with vulnerability. She plucks one's heartstrings firmly and tiptoes across one's soul.
Her cred and renown hasn't been harmed any, neither, by high-profile national supports of late, not least for Canadian phenomenon, Neko Case.
Jordie Lane is one step behind Cloher, inasmuch as having just released his first album (well, going on a year ago, truth be told), Sleeping Patterns, on which altar, as with Cloher's, many affirming adjectives have been sacrificed by otherwise characteristically stingy critics. Indeed, both these precious, precocious songbirds have already been elvated to nationally-treasured status by those who ought to know and I can raise no objection; rather, despite my penchant for prickly dissent, I'd be the first to chime with any such chorus.
By all accounts, Lane's blown away audiences at serial album launches (seems they just keep rolling out, these days) and the reasons for such were transparently obvious at Raval. He's also racked-up the requisite 'seen with' brownie-points, with the likes of Cat Power.
These darlings of the music literati are also mine, bolstered in no small measure by their respective live presences. While they currently lack the massive marketing clout necessary to elevate them to immortal, mythical, or legendary status, they surely don't lack the substance which makes it so much easier to sell.
Lane has been compared with everyone from Bob Dylan to Gram Parsons. Sometimes I think a critic is prone to write the first thing that comes into his or her head. The Dylan comparison is valid in terms of the compelling quality of his songs, but it was likely made because he blows a little harmonica, while playing his guitar. He has the weight, the gravitas, of Gram, but the most striking resemblance for mine is vocally, to Rufus Wainwright. (Ironically, I've heard him compared with Loudon, but I can't hear that.) Lane's voice, like RW's, is one which can suddenly and effortlessly take flight, like some majestic, mythical bird, taking you along for the emotional ride.
But Cloher took the stage first, alone, one slight, raven-haired, all-black-clad woman and her guitar. Caught almost by surprise, like the proverbial bunny in the spotlight, as the velvet curtain slinked back, her soothing, laidback, at-ease patter segued into Rain, arguably the greatest song from her catalogue and one of the most affecting of all meditations on the trauma of the breakup, leaving bitterness behind, in deference to aching, poetic tenderness. Cloher's pining vocal veritably throbs with the loneliness and emptiness of fresh separation. She becomes a vessel for the tears we've all shed over lovers.
I watched her mouth, the words through the glass,
As the rain, it flooded the underpass,
And the light from the restaurant hit her face in a way
That made me wish that she would stay.
And her makeup ran in a little black river,
Over pores, and years, and loves withered.
I’m a simple man, but I know this much,
Joy in a woman is as good as her touch.
From plumbing these depths and without missing a beat Cloher unselfconsciously launched into a brief history of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, hapless concubine of drug overlord and infamous protege of Neddy Smith, Warren Lanfranchi, in fearlessly introducing her ode to same. Her punchy anecdote introduced her very own colourful character: a leather-skinned 'orange roughy' from Surfers Palestine, prematurely-stooped by her beastly burden of gold chains. Yet beneath the cynicism and ridicule players in this real-life drama seem to universally engender, Cloher again seeks and finds the innocent, tender heart of the story, in the genuine, if misplaced and deluded 'Stand By Your Man' love the beautiful Huckstepp found with hardman Lanfranchi. As always, Cloher delivers with the utmost sincerity and conviction. And she's nothing if not well-researched.
Mother's Desk is the opening cut of Cloher's new album, retelling a 'weird' time in her life, but one 'I'm grateful for', when her academic mother's mind was ravaged by Alzheimer's. Affecting doesn't even cover it.
It's desperately difficult to pin her down, or talk about a particular song, lest you surmise it typical. If her work can be typified, words like atmospheric, accessible (but never at the expense of a certain mystique), redolent and pregnant with imagery fill my mind.
Cloher's been around long enough to have honed her writing and performance to a fine art; perhaps her NIDA training comes to the fore in setting the mood; (it sure as hell wasn't the, ah, quirky, if not odd, Studio 54 lighting). In listening to her, you shall be released.
And let's not forget her 'road-hubby', Troy Robinson, who harmonises so well that, if it weren't for the physical disparities, one could be seduced into thinking they were identical twins, or something. He also plays a mean guitar, and banjo.
If Cloher is pixie-like, Lane is a lovable, if much more than garden-variety gnome; diminutive and bearded, like a babyfaced, mini-me, more coherent, less angst-riddled Ginsberg. Celebrated Westy, Matt Green, joined him on mandolin, harmonies and guitar, with the last sounding eerily and astonishingly like a pedal-steel.
Just as Rain could easily serve as Cloher's piece de resistance, Lane's Sweet Somebody is as consummate as, say Dylan's Lay, Lady, Lay. it has all the makings, hallmarks and mettle of a standard. In but three lines he encapsulates the danger and terror of love, for the sensitive soul. You can almost feel yourself freefalling.
I got a heart that breaks all the time
I got a head that leads me like it's blind
Now I got a sweet somebody on my mind.
Both Cloher and Lane have truth coursing through their musical veins: you can feel it in the form of delicious chills. But when they get through with their stories of longing and broken hearts, they reach out to the audience with their charm, wit and intelligence, with beguiling snippets and delicate slices of their observant lives. A triple treat came in the form of a third set, which brought 'the cougar and her cub', with their respective musical soulmates, all onstage together, to perform surprising covers, like Love Hurts, made most famous by Nazareth's searing, tortured rendition, in 1975, but originally recorded by The Everly Brothers, in 1960, and written by Felice & Boudleaux Bryant, who found their feet in country, but cut a swathe in pop, writing Everly chartbusters like Bye-Bye, Love & All I Have To Do Is Dream. I bet you didn't know that.
OK, they might be a little young to cut the mustard as national treasures, but Cloher & Lane are well on their way. Let's hope they surpass even that status, on the world stage.
JEN CLOHER & JORDIE LANE
NSW
12 May Raval (Macquarie Hotel)
13 May Raval (Macquarie Hotel)
14 May Civic Memorial Hall – Mullumbimby
QLD
15 May Troubadour
VIC
21 May The Thornbury Theatre
23 May Northcote Social Club
SA
29 May Wheatsheaf Hotel
30 May The Singing Gallery
Visit: www.jencloher.com | www.myspace.com/jordielanemusic
