Things I watched, listened to, drank, ate and read this week
Companion, Sluice, an album review
We might best describe this as folk, with an early naughties haze to it. One for the road trip through Alaska that you might have dreamed of. One that might have soundtracked that movie you saw at university that you swore was the best movie you ever saw but can no longer remember the name of. One to have your heart broken to.
I have felt an absence of folk-rock albums I can love in recent years so it is with glee that I have welcomed this dumpster truck of melody onto my lot this week. Companion brings back fond memories of Willie Mason's Where the Humans Eat, or the days when every boy my age wanted to be Conor Oberst, and his album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning felt to one generation what maybe Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited felt to another. Or Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Or Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago.
The album is beautiful.
Ready yourself for folk with a bit of grit and be glad of it, because that’s what good songs should be like—grit in your eye, hands holding the strings tugging at your heart, songs that collectively have enough weight behind them to stand up for you in a fight, and then at least calm you down and put you to sleep when you inevitably lose that fight. This album is all of that.
Expect folk music banging on the door of angst, songs that have some breadth to them. Grit, folk, angst—and the three can be happy/unhappy roommates, and the results of that lodging agreement can result in some truly wondrous moments.
With complete gratitude, I’ll see all roomies for an early morning cry in the kitchen, before we get to arguing over the bins.
House meeting in 5.
On Spotify now or you can order it in at your favourite record store.
Dead Mans Wire, a movie review
Bill Skarsgård (It) and Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things) deliver an exceptional heist movie, proudly wearing its Dog Day Afternoon influences on its 1970's lime green polyester sleeve.
Based on a true story, Tony Kiritsis (Skarsgård) attends an appointment with the rich mortgage broker ML Hall (Al Pacino). On arriving, he is instead met by his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery). Hall is on holiday. Kiritsis feels he has been done wrong in a mortgage deal. Desperate, destitute, he straps a shotgun to the back of Richard’s head rigged up with a dead man’s wire. Any sudden movements will be fatal.
This film is every bit the 1970s, with its muted tones, soundtrack, and frequent interludes from a soul DJ giving it his all in studio cutaways that evoke DJs like Frankie Crocker and Jocko Henderson.
There is clear and celebrated lineage between this and Dog Day Afternoon—enter and steal every scene, Al Pacino—and fans of Fargo and The Big Lebowski will feel at home with its dark humour and rich character palette.
On limited release in some cinemas now. Catch it on the big screen if you can. I suspect Stranger Things Dacre Montgoomery's staring role will see this on Netflix soon.
Outlaw, Michael Striessguth, a book review
In the 1950s and ’60s, Nashville was a place to do business. Music business. A place where the saloon doors of commerce stood wide open for any cowboy or girl who thought themselves talented enough to stake a claim in the new Wild West of popular entertainment.
Go to Nashville during that heady time as an aspiring musician and you could wander into a bar and find yourself sitting next to the likes of Chet Atkins, president of RCA Records, a man with enough power to change your life and make you a legend. Consider this just one of your possible outcomes in a City made for and run by musicians.
This is the version of Nashville where the action is set for this enjoyable, if sometimes a little slow, study of the time when three outlaws came to town to shake things up: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.
Prior to their arrival, the success of country music in 1950s America necessitated an industrious approach to churning out that highly lucrative sound that would come to be known as The Nashville Sound. Think I Fall to Pieces by Patsy Cline or He’ll Have to Go by Jim Reeves. Sometime around the mid-60s, as the impact of counterculture was felt across the music industry, this wholesome, domesticated brand of country sold fewer units.
Skywards, the crows were circling the Nashville.
Fear not, because also skywards was Kris Kristofferson, an army helicopter pilot and Oxford graduate, who, without any invitation at all, landed a rented helicopter on the lawn of Johnny Cash to hand him his demos. Meanwhile, Waylon Jennings, with one pocket full of pills and the other full of songs, could be found working down on Music Row as a writer, and Willie Nelson too, both working hard to put their cotton-picking past behind them in favour of a life of artistic fulfilment and all the bounties that may carry.
The three writers had a lot more in common with the musicians of San Francisco than they did with the old guard of Nashville, they were essentially hippies in Stetsons and after a long old romantic slog, and time spent struggling to have their take on country music heard, their appeal crossed over and the Nashville Sound of old found itself in the Country Hall of Fame—as a much-loved exhibit, a thing of the past.
But a word to the wise: as you approach this tale of misfits and rebels that could write you a love song as quick as they could punch you in the eye, the real harm here is just how administrative this book can sometimes be. The admin cuts like a bullet.
There are large sections where it feels like you are reading pages and pages of names—names of record label people, names of musicians, names of promoters, venues. The names are endless. At times its like those conversations where someone just assumes you know the same people they do, and you stand, and you nod, and hope the chat moves onto something a bit more interesting soon. And thankfully, in this book at least, it often does.
As a text from which to learn, this is formidable. You might enjoy it more if you approach it with a rudimentary knowledge of Nashville artists and country music, and if you’re lucky enough to have been to Nashville—or if you’re planning on going—this is certainly one to read, but only if you’re nerdy enough to sit through the roll call of the bit players in this otherwise fascinating story.
I bought my copy of this book in Nashville on a Guitar Social retreat.
Bar Termini, a bar review
Soho is much like Disneyland for cocktail lovers, and I ain’t complaining. But, as is with Disneyland, quite often, it’s all in the design or costumes, and if you look a little more closely beyond that display wall of rare bird portraits or behind that rubber character mask, you’ll find a measly 25ml shot and a whole load of fruit juice, or a drama student trying to make their rent—depending on which analogy you are keeping up with at this point.
Bar Termini is none of that. It’s small, old school, modestly put together with Parisian class, and a drinks menu for grown-ups.
I had the Scofflaw, which is off-menu because I’m just that kind of irritant, and I was on my own, because sometimes, 2pm on a Thursday is the exact right time to go and have a drink.
Bar Termini is at 7 Old Compton Street. If you have a handle on your life and you are visiting outside of day time hours, you should book in advance, seats are limited.
E-Vittles, a food review
You’ll find this unique place for a lunchtime curry seconds away from the Guitar Social’s base in Shoreditch. There is one table that you can ask to sit at, although I think they mainly do take-out trade for the day workers, and there are three options—plus rice. If you want to sit in, it’s £1.50 more, and my recommendation is that you do. While enjoying your food, take in the décor. There’s an oak sideboard with a mirror. On that, brass ornaments, figures of people hunting, memorabilia associated with the East India Trading Company—all of the mad-as-hell eclectic stuff that my grandma used to collect on an almost identical sideboard.
As we talked with the owner while paying our £15 for a long lunch for two, we learned that this place has been here a while—opening up some time just after Covid. They then went up the road to run a much larger place where 32 could eat at once, but when that didn’t go their way, they returned to this tiny space, and I’m glad they did.
You can find E-Vittles by leaving our home in Shoreditch, turning left, then left again.