NEW ALBUM RELEASE
Money and Lies -
SOLD MY SOUL FOR ROCK AND ROLL label,
Caught Live; Paul Ansell @ the Blues Kitchen 23/10/09
Review from Brian Clack
There has lately been a spate of music venues that have opened in London over the last few months offering blues, booze & soul food, in competition with the long-established Ain't Nothin' But Blues Bar (going strong since 1993). The Charlotte Street Blues Bar, in Goodge Street, opened wide its doors back in June, the following month saw the inception of the Round Midnight Jazz & Blues Bar, housed in Liverpool Street, opposite Angel tube station, & the middle of this month saw the Blues Kitchen, situated in Camden High Street, throw its hat into the ring. I have visited these three new contenders for London's top blues venue & the way I see it, Round Midnight offers the best jazz & blues artistes based in the UK, Charlotte's mixes UK acts & the occasional visiting American (Dwayne Dopsie & Alvin Youngblood Hart have already trod Charlotte's boards) &, whether they realise it or not, the Blues Kitchen's what's-on guide features UK blues & rockabilly acts.
Paul Ansell is without doubt one of this country's most talented rockin' country practitioners, & yet here he was at the Blues Kitchen performing, with his band Number Nine, two sets that slayed an audience that comprised of 35% blues fans & 75% pop-rock followers, a show that will, for me, be a front-runner for gig of the year by a British artist. Influenced by Elvis rather than being a slavish copy, as it were, Paul has been on the scene for some 25 years & through the years has released consistently strong albums, all of which mix originals & covers, & the covers cover an extrordinarily wide range of styles, as the non-believers among the Blues Kitchen crowd discovered tonight. Solid in musical & visual style, the combo announced themselves forcefully with Ansell's own "Guess I'll Cry Instead", & there then followed a series of covers, all cooked to perfection, by way of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues", Kenny Rogers' "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town", Dan Penn's "Tear Joint", Floyd Cramer's "Flip, Flop & Bop", Don Gibson's "Sea Of Heartbreak", & John Fogerty's "Proud Mary", then a powerful, rockin' original in "Rockin' In Memphis", & closing out the first set were perfectly executed takes on Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" & Tim Rose's "Hey Joe".
Wide-ranging material but look at the set-list for the second half; Arthur Crudup's "My Baby Left Me", so memorably rocked up by Elvis & the inspiration for Paul's version, Aaron Neville's "How Can I Help But Love You", a steaming-hot "Johnny B. Goode", the title track from Paul's Nashville-cut CD, "Love Conquers All", Marvin Rainwater's "My Brand Of Blues", the King's "His Latest Flame", a roof-raising rendition of Roy Orbison's Sun-minted "Sweet & Easy To Love", an explosive original in "It Ain't Right", Iggy Pop's "Passenger", Will Bradley's "Down The Road Apiece" (with James Compton whipping up a storm on piano), Duane Eddy's "Forty Miles Of Bad Road", another original in the form of the mid-tempo "Thank God For The Radio", & Billy Ocean's "Red Light Spells Danger". The crowd were in party mood throughout, with plenty of energetic, enthusiastic dancing, & fever-pitch was reached with the encore, Bullmoose Jackson's salacious R&B hit from 1952, "Big Ten Inch Record". All in all, then, a veritable feast of rockin' sounds from the platter served at the Blues Kitchen by master musical chef Paul Ansell & Number Nine; you can bet they'll be back there again before 2009 is out. |
