Despite being welcomed onto the stage by a strangely hypnotic pre-recorded message suggesting that our “eyes are getting heavier and heavier” and advising us that soon we will be “in a wonderful deep sleep”, St. Paul and the Broken Bones quickly jolt us out of any such reverie as the tumult of ‘Atlas’ bleeds into ‘3000 AD Mass’ and Paul Janeway is asking what is surely a rhetorical question, “Lord, can you hear me up there in the sky?“ His voice – lying somewhere between those of CeeLo Green and Otis Redding – has already reached industrial-strength decibel levels. And by the time they career into ‘The Last Dance’ and Janeway rat-a-tats the song’s refrain – “bang bang goes the the feeling through my brain” – the eight-piece band from Birmingham, Alabama are ablaze. It may well be two days shy of St. Paul and the Broken Bones reaching their 10th anniversary as a band, but they are clearly already in the mood to celebrate.
St. Paul and the Broken Bones are in Leeds limbering up for a headline appearance this coming weekend at the Cambridge Folk Festival. The sound that they create may not immediately seem like the perfect fit for that event but as the late jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong once wisely said, “all music is folk music”. And St. Paul and the Broken Bones’ fourth studio album, The Alien Coast – released in January of this year – serves to illustrate this point, defying as it does simple categorisation. Once described purely as a soul band, their latest record bears witness to that blueprint having been ripped up and reassembled to form an evolutionary sound that also embraces strong elements of R’n’B, funk, metal, and psychedelia.
Come the slower blues of ‘Sanctify’ and Paul Janeway is straight off the stage and deep into the capacity crowd, all 400 tickets for this show having long since sold out. As he climbs up towards the sound desk Janeway is illuminated by the glow from dozens of mobile phones, his silhouette projected onto the venue’s ceiling. For a fleeting moment I am reminded of Hank Quinlan in the 1958 film Touch of Evil when, following his capture, the corrupt police officer’s long shadows can be seen on the sewer roof. In this classic film noir, Tanya (played by Marlene Dietrich) tells Orson Welles’ character “your future is all used up”.
But unlike Quinlan, the future looks incredibly bright for Paul Janeway and St. Paul and the Broken Bones. In September 2020 he became a father for the first time and sings a beautifully heartfelt ‘Magnolia Trees’, a song that he had written for his daughter. It is one of a number of new tunes the band test drive tonight. “If you like ‘em, let us know”, Janeway says before playfully adding “if you don’t…shut up”. I don’t hear any dissenting voices. The new material sounds superb.
For the grand finale, St. Paul and the Broken Bones take us right back to their debut album, 2014’s Half the City, for a triumphant valedictory blast of ‘Call Me , bringing down the curtain on what will surely be one of the gigs of the year.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos from this show can be found HERE
