Finding themselves unexpectedly living in the same patch of North America (“We both married into Canada” Pernice explains), The Pernice Brothers bandleader Joe Pernice and Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake began playing together casually.
An arrangement which has now become an ongoing concern, bringing together two of indie pop’s most cherished songwriters, and making the year for anyone with a fondness for the often fashionable but always stellar music they have created.
It seems a completely logical collaboration, not just because both songwriters mine a broadly similar vein of tuneful jangle-pop, but because of their obvious friendship and ease with each other.
Despite the crossover in their fanbases, there’s also a pleasing yin-yang component to their pairing – Pernice’s exquisitely sad and literary approach balancing out Blake’s rare knack for writing warm pop songs of pure contentment and resignation.
There’s a full length record on the way this year, but their partnership has so far yielded an EP (under the name The New Mendicants) which features the first song played here, ‘Sarasota’, a melancholy tune based on the classic film Midnight Cowboy.
The bulk of the set however is drawn from the stockpiles of melodic goodness of the pair’s respective back catalogues, with the first section of the set featuring latter-day Teenage Fanclub beauties like ‘It’s All in My Mind’ and ‘When I Still Have Thee’.
Both reminders that the group’s 2000s output, while sparse, remains criminally underappreciated and completely, disarmingly gorgeous.
In the refined, sit-down environment of the Spiegeltent, their show is a decidedly relaxed and pleasantly low-key affair, with no set list and the pair conferring before each song on what to play and, at times, what key each song is in.
“That was my first time playing tambourine on stage,” Blake confesses after one song. “I felt kind of self-conscious.”
After taking something of a back seat early in the show, Pernice gives us ‘The Loving Kind’, a standout from the most recent Pernice Brothers record (the 2010 grower Goodbye, Killer) and ‘Amazing Glow’, which sees him recount the story of featuring in an episode of TV’s Gilmore Girls to play the song.
Arriving at the set in his usual clothes to play a character described as a scruffy street busker, he was directed to wardrobe to get dressed for the shoot, only for the wardrobe director to decide he already looked perfect for the part.
Some of the new songs were written for possible inclusion on the soundtrack to the forthcoming film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Long Way Down, which focuses on a disparate group of people who meet on a rooftop ledge of New Year’s Eve, each intending to jump. This meant the task of writing songs about suicide, a theme that Pernice explains with a wry shrug was something that he actually found “pretty easy.”
There’s long been a macabre streak that has lurked beneath the genteel and pretty surfaces of both his songwriting and his lesser-known but excellent fiction – not for nothing was ‘Chicken Wire’ once voted the most heartbreakingly beautiful song ever written.
One particularly lovely new work, featuring images of a face stained by teardrops, brings to mind the poignant, stripped-down beauty of Simon and Garfunkel classic ‘April Come She Will’.
Another moment of conferring between the pair leads to Blake telling the story of how Grant McLennan (on what would be would one of his last tours) showed them how to play the song.
Blake confesses to being rusty on the chords and having had a rushed backstage run-through, but the version is immaculate, twin jangling guitars teasing out its aching qualities.
Later there’s ‘Everything Flows’, prompting Pernice to say “check out my arms when I play this, I’m such a fan of this song, I’m going to have goose bumps. If you don’t like this song, you seriously have no soul.”
It’s probably the only nod in the set to Teenage Fanclub’s noise-drenched early work, but rendered here on acoustic guitars it works almost as well as a more sedate, meditative piece as it does as a dense shoegaze mini-epic.
In a chatty mood throughout, Pernice also explains the origins of waltz-paced heartbreaker ‘Cronulla Breakdown’, written in a condo in the famous Sydney suburb before Blake revisits a previous collaboration with ‘You Was Me’ (from the self-titled Jonny record he made with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynki singer Euros Childs). The set proper finishes with a Teenage Fanclub B-side, ‘Dark and Lonely Night’ .
While the crowd, many here more for the opportunity to see a festival show in such unique and charming surroundings, may have been subdued for most of the set, by the end they are won over.
Sustained applause sees the pair return for an encore of ‘There Goes The Sun’ which gradually winds down and fades to silence.
A beautiful, understated end to a beautifully understated show.
