Performance: Gomez

Powerstation

Review: Russell Baillie


I don't smoke, but after a night with Gomez I'm thinking of starting.

It wasn't just that a hot, packed airconditioning-challenged Powerstation was enveloped on Friday in a harsh eye-stinging tobacco fog even before the English art-rock band took the stage.

It was the nicotine-fired inspiration in the form of Ben Ottewell - one of Gomez's three singers - a man who might look like an accountant on a particularly casual Friday but whose voice is the roaring fireplace to the chimney he smokes like.

It's a big, gruff wondrous thing live, even more emotively impressive than on record. But if it's the most obvious weapon, Gomez's armoury doesn't stop there.

As their two hours on stage showed, the instrument-swapping five piece are really something quite remarkable - a band whose brand of folk, blues, psychedelia and occasional electronics sounds both authentic and vitally reinventive.

And their richly textured delivery might have caused many fans of the albums to think they hadn't been playing them loud enough at home. On CD, their generally mellow-paced songs might match coffee table demands, but live, Gomez offered sweeping dynamics and an inclusive, celebratory mood.

That was from the opening songs - and the opening of Ottewell's mouth - of Get Miles and Hangover (an acid-blues of sitar-twangs and tempo-shifts) through to the much-deserved multiple encores.

Along the way these happy slackers conjured up much bonhomie via the jaunty singalong Get Myself Arrested and a spot of flamenco dancing at the start of Las Vegas Dealer. There were also expansive grooves on the likes of Here Comes the Breeze, which headed into an extended stomp that was part clubland hydraulics, part John Lee Hooker's left foot.

And to top it off, a couple of moments of quietly ragged beauty, especially We Haven't Turned Around, a throaty ballad on which Ottewell sucked up the last traces of oxygen in the room.

Yes, you could try pinning out some embarrassingly archaic comparisons - Little Feat anyone? - on them. Or make the observation that every generation gets the psychedelic blues-jam band it deserves (usually they're American, tedious and mysteriously popular), and that perhaps Gomez could be the Ecstasy era's Grateful Dead.

Whatever. On the night, even without the help of that lung-defeating atmosphere, Gomez were simply breathtaking.