Well this must have been the first time that I’ve seen the headliner for a gig moved to an earlier slot due to engineering works on the train line later in the evening.  How about that for a sign of these post-Thatcher, post-Blair, all decay and no fun times?  Can’t blame Richard Youngs for that though, whose live performance renaissance was set to continue at Kings Cross’s confusingly named Cross Kings, with or without the help of those chuggy-stoppy chuggy-stoppy stoppy-stoppy boxes on rails.

We were warmed up by a brief appearance from a duo called Nawadaha, who added some vaguely middle Eastern wailing to guitar before an as yet unassembled audience.  The fact that there were no guitar pedals meant that the only thing that grabbed my attention was that there were no guitar pedals.  I don’t remember the last time I saw that; it confused my little brain, which doesn’t seem to get anything anymore that doesn’t come caked in distortion.

So Richard Youngs was on next, casting train tickets disdainfully into the crowd as he climbed onto the stage.  As last time I saw him, much of the set was entirely a cappella; elliptical soliloquies from the Naïve Shaman album such as “Life On A Beam” and a captivating rendition of “Summers Edge”, its intriguing irregular metres exposed by the lack of musical accompaniment. These bookended some highlights from most recent - and much praised round these parts - album Autumn Responses, which showcased some delightful, impressionistic acoustic guitar from Youngs.  I suppose he had to be good; James Blackshaw was in the crowd.  “Low Bay Of Sky” was the evening’s highlight, a typically oblique song which runs in a spiral around an inner sadness. 

After Youngs had dashed off trainwards, the crowd seemed to switch entirely – the front few rows were taken up by attentive cross-legged Finns, sitting attentively at the feet of their fellow countryman Pekko Kappi.  Playing only a peculiar lyre-like instrument (I asked him afterwards what it was called, he told me that it was a “jouhikko”. And what does that mean, I asked.  “Well, jou means horse’s hair.  So it means a thing with horse’s hair”), he managed to keep them, and those of us new to his charms, utterly spellbound.   In stereo typical Finnish fashion, the songs tended to the morose – his translations of their meanings included “snow please cover my grave”, and most worringly, “a girl being exploded” – but were delivered with a likeable charm, and an assured mastery of his instrument.  Truly excellent.

The Telescopes, who only minutes earlier during Kappi’s set were trying their best to hush a bunch of extremely unpleasant men (I don’t know what was louder, their gobs or their haircuts) into silence, sent me out the door in a hushed reverie. Crouching on the floor, sawing at guitars with violin bows, and hacking at strings with forks, they produced big waves of Double Leopards / Vev Ov Ard drone.  I opened my eyes for long enough to notice that their guitars had pedals.  I totally got the Telecopes. And I totally got home without any transport-related nonsense, thank you very much.