I’m a little confused by The Local’s expansion into the promotion of gigs all across London. When they were doing shows in The Kings Head (annoyingly apostrophe free – the Kings head where exactly?) in Crouch End it made sense.  Not least of all because it technically is my local.  But Shepherd’s Bush isn’t local to anywhere as far as I can tell – even its two tube stations aren’t local to each other.  Still, seems churlish to complain when the Local – in conjunction with the End Of The Road folks – put together evenings as enjoyable as this one.  And for a highly bargainous fiver too.  I would have paid several times that just to see Tujiko Noriko alone; she doesn’t exactly play here too often.

It was a very strong start to the night with the ten-piece Sons of Noel and Adrian (the folk Earth, Wind and Fire by virtue of their number),  leading on us on a journey “from shanty to Schoenberg” as they put it.  The more classical sections dissolved into arrangements which brought to mind Robert Kirby’s work for Nick Drake’s first two albums, although  there was one particularly well done “Day In The Life” style crescendo.  Their songs of the sea and shipwrecks made me feel suitably salty; I enjoyed them greatly despite my confusion over the startling yet somewhat incongruous singing voice – which sounded a bit more American(a) and a bit less Brighton than I would have expected. I purchased one of their four-track hand-painted bird-festooned CDs – along with everyone else it seems, as there were only a few left.

Despite being a two piece girl-boy electric blues combo, The Congregation are about as far away from The White Stripes as you could get.  Much grittier, with a singer who stood hand-on-hip, spitting lyrics out the side of her mouth in a wrecked-on-bourbon drawl.  She was ably supported by some excellent Southern (well, New Cross is South, innit?) slide guitar and somewhat ragged foot-stomping by her colleague through a selection of songs, none of which seemed to trouble unnecessarily the two-minute mark. 

By the time The Cave Singers took the stage, the cool-kid chatter noise levels had already risen to a point where if I closed my eyes I could have imagined I was in the pub.  The aforementioned Kings Head, maybe.  They were up against it from the start, and despite their best efforts to engage with the crowd – happy birthday sing-songs, calling us beautiful – they never quite managed to win over the self-obsesseds at the back.  A shame really, as their brand of delta blues back porch stomp, occasionally with something curiously circular and a bit krauty about it, has something quite endearing about it.

Tujiko Noriko cooed her slightly breathy Japanese-language melodies over a wondrous backdrop of laptop sounds, beginning with some flarey whooshes panning from speaker which had me ducking for cover,  Thereafter the rhythms of her songs were spindly frames made of snippets of what could have been gates closing, frogs chirruping, underwater lowing, wind rushing, and more.  Or, indeed, none of these, and instead just some laptop generated noises which my head felt inclined to transport to a natural setting given the loveliness of it all. 

A couple of songs seemed to rattle to an end rather abruptly as if she didn’t know quite how to stop them, so when she did manage to cut one out mid-flow, it took her giggly apologies for us to twig that she didn’t actually mean to do it.  She managed to coax the magic box back into life for a version of “Magic” from Solo, whose lovely melodies were carried atop a mechanical-sounding fluster.  After a finale which concluded with her laptop bleating high pitched tones, this rare UK appearance by this magician from the East ended – alas, all too quickly.  Still, worth my five crumply pounds; I may pass an evening in the non-local Local again.