With the Tamworth Music Festival having just concluded, a little bit of country music filtered down to Sydney for an evening at the sacred drinking and music establishment The Basement.
The somewhat paltry crowd in attendance seemed eager to hear the double bill of songbirds Emma Swift, from Australia, and the USA’s Elizabeth Cook. Maybe it was a lack of decent advertising or quite possibly it was just a Thursday night that caused the lack of attendance tonight.
Emma Swift has been a radio presence on Triple J as a newsreader and is the US correspondent for another music publication here in Australia; but she is also a singer-songwriter.
With a petite and appealing set, Swift gave the room a taste of her songwriting skills and a charming version of “These Days” by Jackson Browne.
Swift noted she did not write many happy songs and the set travelled on with music that was akin to the Cowboy Junkies in tone and mood. Her songs “Come See Me” and “King Of America” are worthy of note and she made Tammy Wynette proud with her cover of George Jones’ “Walk Through This World With Me.”
Headliner Elizabeth Cook is a firecracker from below the Mason/Dixon Line. With years on the road and performance in her veins, even with a small band, she was able to keep most of the eyes and ears of the audience glued to the stage.
With a regional dialect coloured with her mother’s West Virginia drawl and her Floridian youth, Cook took pause early on in the set, after a version of “Times Are Tough In Rock and Roll” (from her Balls release); asking the listeners if they understood a word she said.
Everyone answered in the negative. “I was getting that feeling,” Cook replies.
After comparing that linguistic problem to her inability to understand her well-known bassist from New Zealand, Bones Hillman, and comparing ‘having a squiz’ to ‘taking a whizz’; you knew the entertainment tonight was not going to be purely musical.
Cook mixed it up through the night with a variety of styles of music as she gave yarns about her life story.
Coming from a large blended family of 11 siblings; a daddy who learned bass in the prison band; losing her parents in the last few years and her stress at having to plan an ‘event’ (a funeral for her Mom that is) that would ‘suck’, all kept the crowd laughing.
Cook was almost a stereotype of a country singer based on the stories she was spinning and with over 200 performances at The Grand Ole Opry, she truly is a country star.
But the music doled out by Hillman, Cook and her guitarist and songwriter/husband Tim Carroll, would have had a more raucous, energised crowd on their feet.
With comedic lyricals like “El Camino”, and the drunken sex song “Say Yes To Booty”, the smiles were never far away.
Cook proved that she had earned her stripes singing since she formed her first band at 9 years old. She aced Gram Parson’s ‘Hot Burrito # 1’ and her gospel cover of Rev. Gary Davis’ “If I Had My Way” was a stunning combination of gospel and bluegrass picking.
The cover of Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” was one that none in the audience would have seen coming, but it was beautiful in its appearance nonetheless.
With a musical nod to Kasey Chambers, Elizabeth Cook closed the night with a rowdy rendition of ‘If I Could (Gone Fishin’)’, which had the crowd clapping and hooting along.
Totally winning over some new admirers with a set list of excellent self-penned material and covers, her stage presence was astonishingly relaxed, making for a top notch night of entertainment.
