What’s the connection between Muscle Shoals, near
Birmingham, Alabama, USA and Kings Heath, Birmingham, UK? A minor clue: go via
Nashville. Yes, it’s music, and to be more specific, it’s a show in a small
local venue last week. Few UK music fans may have heard of 29 year old Alabama singer
songwriter Hannah Aldridge, but if Americana – a fusion of folk, country,
blues, rock & roll – ever gains wider attention in the UK, she would surely be in the
forefront.
Let’s start in Alsager, near Stoke on Trent. We’d found out
that Don Gallardo and his band, who happened to be playing at Nashville’s
celebrated Bluebird Café when we made it there 8 weeks ago, were on a UK tour.
Their opening act, playing a half hour slot with no back up other than her own
acoustic guitar, was Hannah Aldridge. There was something captivating about
her, reinforced by her CDs Razor Wire and Gold Rush which she gratefully signed
for us after her performance. When we found out that she would be at the
Kitchen Garden in Kings Heath a week later, this time as a headliner, this was
an opportunity not to be missed.
What about Hannah Aldridge’s music? OK, think of any
Fleetwood Mac song led by Stevie Nicks. Think of songs from the Nashville TV
series performed by Juliette or Scarlett – that’s high praise, by the way, the
songs combine perfectly with the musical politics and family tribulations to
make prime time TV. Add in her own main influence, Jackson Browne, and a
complicated life story. That’s a lot to go on. But after listening to the two
CDs in full, both with full conventional band support, how would she get on as
a headliner when it would once again be only her and a guitar?
We needn’t have worried. The Kitchen Garden had certain
similarities with the Bluebird – definitely a listening room rather than a bar
with a stage. It was one of those up close and personal performances. And once
again it was captivating. As she said in an interview, “I think people really
enjoy that I treat my audience like we are in my living room.”
Best songs? OK, let’s take two from each album. From ‘Gold
Rush’, there’s ‘I Know Too Much’, and ‘Burning Down Birmingham’, the latter
definitely not a commemoration of the Handsworth riots or anything related to
civil rights, but an old flame song enabling the audience to join in and chant
the chorus. And from ‘Razor Wire’, let’s go for ‘Parchman’, where Hannah stood
in the shoes of a woman on death row who had killed her abusive husband, and ‘Howlin’
Bones’, where she bravely abandoned her microphone and went entirely unplugged
to close the show – and it worked.
