Looking for stagecraft and charisma is an odd part of reviewing a music show. If it’s there, you don’t see it. If it’s not, its absence becomes all that you do see. Billy Jones is very much flirting with this danger: his rambling, directionless intro to the show, as well as his overly long introduction to each song, genuinely started to grate by the third of fourth number. That he says all of this in a muttered monotone filled with ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ doesn’t help either. However, when he and his band actually do start playing, their talent does shine through.
Jones and his band - a fiddler and a plectrum banjoist - play a grassroots blues style of music. Three chord blues is also in evidence (I honestly expected two old men with a washboard and a whiskey bottle to come out and join in). That is not to take away from the musicians’ skill, however: all three are clearly proficient at their instrument.
Jones’ vocals took a while longer to nail down. He affects a strained, raspy tone in his songs, which, while it works on the faster and louder songs, had a tendency to drift in and out of tune during the slower ones. By and large, however, Jones’ singing was fine and the harmonies he made with his band were pleasant on the ear. The songwriting also suffered from moments of worry: lyrics ‘I woke up in the morning next to you/I went and got you a coffee’ stray dangerously close to banality and some of Jones’ songs were somewhat clichéd. His song ‘I saw the devil’, about a documentary he saw on a group of rich men during the presidential election (it was a long introduction) is a glaring example. However, Jones’ idea of giving his albums away for free in exchange for a donation to Greenpeace arguably makes you expect this sort of material from the start.
If you enjoy grassroots blues and jazz and have a bit of patience, there is fine show to be had here. A solid, if uninspired, performance.
