Josh T Pearson, Cumberland Arms, Newcastle
Written by Greg Smyth
Published January 03, 2006
Josh T Pearson, gangly ZZ Top-bearded Texan and former Lift To Experience frontman, sits hunched contemplatively over his electro-acoustic guitar. Boasting no more props than a large scotch at his side and a slew of cheap drummer jokes delivered in a cynical laboured drawl, Pearson stomps his way through a set of dark brooding songs with religious undertones. That Josh had a notoriously difficult relationship with his straight-edge preacher man father explains much - it's little coincidence that he twists it through a whisky glass darkly into a hard drinking Nick Cave-esque sin and redemption trip. It's all set to a glorious hybrid country racket that bleeds into cacophonic post-rock noise, Pearson stamping out the beat with the heal of his cowboy boot as if riven with convulsions. A near religious experience, just don't tell Josh.
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photography by Lucy Johnston
Josh Pearson / Dirty Three - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
07 December 2005
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads saved my life, back in the day. I spent months listening to nothing else, preaching it to everyone I met, and that stretched coda at the end of 'Into The Storm' - "we shall be free" - shellshocked me to silence every time. It still does.
I've never been in a room with any of my heroes before, and I'm nervy, twitchy, hungover, talking too much. That thing they always said is running around my head - never meet your heroes. So I wait, hungover from a night of red wine that stretched until dawn, and generally feel like shit.
So he shuffles on stage, Mr Josh Pearson, hair exploding in every direction from underneath a battered cowboy hat, his face hidden behind a huge beard, still looking like he's on the run from the pages of a William Faulkner novel. All in black, red handkerchief around his neck, bronze steer skull on his belt, cowboy boots. He doesn't look at the crowd and just as I think he's about to start his mobile phone rings. He looks embarrassed but answers anyway and speaks for a minute or so with laughter ringing every time he insists that yes, he is on stage, and yes, he does have to go now.
He hangs up, apologises, and with the briefest of introductions launches 'The Clash' straight at us. From a whisper to a scream, straight up into the stratosphere, huge waves of almost-noise rolling out of the speakers, it's like a bomb going off. I can't hear anything but the music, but I'm sure that there was a slight gasp from the crowd, as if someone had poured freezing water over us.
Sat on his chair, flailing at his guitar, he's rocking back and forwards and stamping one foot down, rattling the whisky glass and the guitar case and everything else, breaking strings, he looks for all the world like there's something inside of him that he can barely control. With his head back and his left leg stomping on the boards, whiplash drones streaming from his guitar, I'm thinking of Son House, of 'Preaching Blues'. There's the same grain and guts, the same blood, the same desperate wrench of religion. But where Son fought, Josh surrenders, finding rapture in his racket, dragging his visions into reality.
It bears repeating, but it's about as loud as you can imagine one man and one guitar being. And that noise, it comes around me like a sandstorm, until it's in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, and in the middle of that noise I begin to hear things, the vibration of strings and the catch in his throat. I'm on the edge of overload and stranded, hanging, kept from tipping over into by melodies that keep rising up like beautiful mirages in a bone-dry desert.
But it's weird to hear these songs, these beautiful desperate last-gasp howls, and then to hear him talk between them when he mumbles and laughs at himself and tells jokes in a monotone. He looks incredibly uncomfortable, as if he's about to fall into stage fright, as if he's not sure his songs are worth singing. And despite the cheers that greet him at the end of each song, he looks no more at ease. He looks like he thinks we're just humouring him, or taking the piss.
There's still a strange gap between him and the crowd. When he plays it almost feels like I'm watching something private, powerful as it. I'm waiting, though I don't know it until it comes, for something to join us and him and his songs together, some moment of alignment.
The Moment comes just before the last song he plays, the moment when his rapture becomes ours and mine and we're all in it together.
He murmurs the quiet running introduction to 'Angels and Devils' just as a swell of chatter rises up from the back of the room. And with what's gone before - the nervy jokes, the avoidance of eye contact, the mumbling - I have the sudden fear that he's just going to play on and let those voices stomp over him or else wander off-stage.
I should have known better. He's not a man to back down from a fight, not when it needs fighting. He leaves a chord hanging in the air, and he looks up from his guitar, past the front of the crowd, an Old Testament glower on his face. He stops and speaks to those of us listening.
"Hey, I got an idea, so just roll along with me. Let's all sing together and see if we can drown out those motherfuckers, yeah?"
There's a huge cheer.
"All right. I'll sing. You guys sing along, okay? Yeah? Just put your cool down for a minute - it's okay, you don't have to tell anyone - and follow me."
Another huge cheer. I think I can see a grin under the beard.
"Fuck it. Let's drown these heathens out."
And this time he doesn't murmur the song into existence, he barrels it towards us, straight over us, and as we join in we know the battle's already won.
Singing with him, hollering along in our barroom hymnal, I can't help but think why this cuts right into me, this Southern religious apocalypse. And it comes to me, fully-formed - he's not singing about religion, he's singing about faith.
Faith, I can dig.
I feel stupid for not realising it before. Sure, his songs are full of biblical images, of blood in the desert and martyrs under hot suns, of hosts of angels and the devils that live on your shoulder, but he's not asking you to believe in God, not really, he's asking you to believe in something better and bigger and worth fighting for and maybe even worth dying for.
He might believe in the power of God, but he's singing about the power of individuals. He's not singing about a coming fight just to sing about a coming fight, he's singing because he believes that we can win, that we need to win, that the darkness and bullshit - the demons, the devils - aren't insurmountable. And when he sings of angels, he's singing about us. We're the ones fighting the devils, in whatever form they come (though they mostly come middle-aged with short hair and simple suits), and we're the ones with the duty of winning.
He's not singing of a Heaven with an entry fee or a list of what you'd owned, how big your car was, he's singing about somewhere where the only thing they check is integrity and whether you did the right thing when you could.
What he does is this - he makes real and immediate to me things that I knew were true: that there are some things worth fighting for, that if you open yourself up and surrender then you'll find people worth fighting for, that if you follow your muse she'll take you to some amazing places, and that - to steal a phrase - in the end, all a man's got is the integrity of his work.
So it's straight and serious, but sometimes that's the right way to do things.
Anyway.
I look up at him, as we're singing along, and there's no mistake now, beneath the beard a huge smile has formed. As he finishes we cheer, and finally he seems to understand that we loved him all along. He doffs his cap and thanks us for singing along and then he's gone.
So, the Dirty Three. They see-saw between savage and beautiful, and they do it whilst looking like three university lecturers out for lunch on the last day of term. Jim White looks alternately bored and amused behind the drums as he rattles loose pulse-steady rhythms that are thisclose to danceable. A few brave souls give it a go. Mick Turner is, I guess, doing something important, and I'm sure we'd miss him if he wasn't there, but he looks as deadpan as White and anyway, you can't hear his guitar over the racket Warren Ellis making. And tonight it's Ellis's show, and tonight Ellis is frenzied - possessed - in his noise. With his back to the crowd, sweat pouring off, lank black hair swinging and kicking his left leg out, he saws at his violin like he's a war surgeon sawing through bone.
It's testament to them that they don't sound silly after the show Pearson put on. They don't. Nowhere near. Where Pearson pulled way back to vast things, to the soul and the sky, the Dirty Three zoom right in to the heart, to every red-raw thing there.
Between songs Ellis rambles and rants with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile at the corner of his mouth and the weird charisma of a street-corner madman preaching to the skies. It's a sight to behold. He talks about early Donovan, about the CIA coming in through the windows, about Phil Collins joining Mark Knopfler in the deepest circle of hell, about talking to angels through telescopes.
'Cinder' reels. 'Red' is woozy, wounded. 'The Zither Player' - for which they're joined by Pearson on mandolin - spirals. It's frenetic, pounding, almost danceable, and after the crescendo it floats over us, exhausted and euphoric. If their set had ended then, it would have been perfect.
But they play on, and while the performance is still fine and fiery, it begins to pall a little. The unravelling structures are the same unravelling structures that we've already heard, the dynamics too similar to what's gone before. Perhaps the pace they reached out of the gate just wasn't sustainable, but for whatever reason they sag just a little, deflating from great to good. As the lights come up, nobody's disappointed, everybody's cheering, there are smiles on each face, but I'm left with an ever-so-slightly hollow feeling.
They save themselves with the encore.
With the house lights already up, Ellis introduces 'Alice Wading' and they find another gear. It starts slow, the violin keening and the drums pulsing like a heartbeat the second before a kiss, and then they explode with the violin swarming now and sawing and rhythm buzzing and flecks of guitar pushing through the noise and the drums now are flaring and rolling, the three of them connected it seems by the telepathy of years of playing, holding it back and spinning it out without looking at each other, regret and sad hope filling the air and then a sustained screeching and onto the final fade of the violin keening once more, the rhythm slowing, the final pulse of the night, and then I'm out on the other side, re-affirmed.
We file out into a freezing Leeds night, stunned to silence. We're at the train station before either of us speaks.
"Jesus."
A smile, a wondering shake of the head.
"Yeah."
(c) Plan B http://www.planbmag.com
photography by Lucy Johnston
Date: 27/10/2005
Paint for
me a picture, if you would: a basement, a stage, a singer. A cigarette hangs, never fully smoked, from the hunched figure's mouth; a guitar - acoustic, albeit electrically empowered, of course - sits upon his lap; his fingers curl and stretch above its strings in preparation of the set to follow. A little banter, a small joke - so far, such a lot of so what?
The so what is Josh Pearson: the stick-thin, skyscraper-tall frontman of Lift To Experience, more hair than human being. His beard spills before him like a waterfall frozen in time, moving only when the bigger picture about it (come now, work with the analogy, please) shifts into life. The cliffs - those sideburns - are topped by the trademark Stetson. The beer's not homebrew from a Texan backwater, but Pearson glugs it back all the same.
A shuffle, a sigh, another quip; then, song. Silence spreads from front to back as chatterboxes close for business: out to lunch, back in 30 minutes, do not disturb. Pearson lets a finger fall, then another, another; strumshine on a winter's day permeates even the deepest dungeon, and the red walls about us break to blue skies. This is the man's power - we know not where he found it, but we're not about to scour an entire state for its source - to bleed from a guitar the very building blocks of an emotionally affecting experience. Once minute he twists a wrist so slightly and the guitar quivers like a nervously dry bottom lip seconds before a first kiss, the throat more barren still, awaiting the gush of excitement collapsing the dam of expectation; the next, Pearson clicks a pedal or two and his instrument wails hellishly like the most savage of banshees, so much so that the man stands, bolt upright, and steps away from the amplifier. The beasts rage, teeth and hiss from inside wood, bars of too-easily-torn metal just keeping what should be restrained from frightening friendly faces. When he sits, again, he stomps and the floor shakes with him; when he requests the aforementioned few before him sing in time with his concluding tale of a devil on the run - the final act of exorcism in a set characterised by the battle of the angelic and its opposite - they do as told, without inhibition.
That's power, of a kind we've not seen before; it's art on a canvas never crafted before, music like something we heard once but forgot a long time ago. That's timelessness right there before us - it's not seen it, done it, bought it, burned it - it's so very far from the picture you painted but minutes ago.
A glass of whiskey sits atop his guitar case, its existence threatened by the continual stomp of thick-heeled boot on stage and a vibration comparable to a thousand back garden-scraping trains running overtime through speakers not worthy of such a boisterously beautiful visitation. Song fades to silence once more, and this time the chatterboxes rest their weapons of choice, taking arms instead together in unison. Or hands, actually, and repeatedly. Those that chose not to sing just smile - what's more, they're not sure why, exactly, but something's good. Something's right about this, something's right on.
And then the hunch is replaced and the man packs away the tools of his trade. Shuffle shuffle once more, sir, to wherever magic is brewed and bottled in your soul. Drink your beer first, do. Then come back, brother, and preach to us once more. We'll bring with us our paints and pencils and do for you a doodle; our sketches, though will never look the same way twice.
Rating: 
(c) Mike Diver http://www.drownedinsound.com