Willy Mason - Liverpool Carling Academy 05.05.07

In March 2006 Willy Mason played a sold out show to roughly 300 in the smallest room of Barfly Liverpool. This year the show sells out again, only this time the venue is the 1200 capacity Carling Academy. Such is the draw of the New Yorker whose mix of accessible political anthems and songs about cats has attracted all kinds of music lover to his warm and intimate shows.

Can a show still be intimate when there are 1200 people there? It’s strange but it can. The heat in the Academy is immense but the bar is virtually ignored once Mason hits the stage, with little brother Sam on guitar and Nina Violet on viola. The subject of the tour is Mason’s second studio album If The Ocean Gets Rough, and like other artists he has enabled fans to listen to the album for free on MySpace for the last two months, ensuring none of the killer ‘We Don’t Know This One’ moments which can distract the casual attendee. This tour has been preceded by a series of ‘Living Room’ gigs, where Willy shows up at the house of a fan and plays literally in their living room. Seeing his stagecraft, you can believe that nothing changes between the set in a lounge in suburbia and the set in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire or the Leadmill.

If The Ocean Gets Rough has had a mixed reception by the popular music press in general, who were so pleased with themselves for liking the Grandma’s Basement EP but cooled towards Where The Humans Eat. It’s not a firebrand Willy that has emerged from the hype of the first album and perhaps that’s where the industry criticism comes from – this is personal writing about his Martha’s Vineyard life and his frustrations at the hypocrisy and greed of the modern world. Mason is still only 23, a fact that can be forgotten when he performs so assuredly, and his world is still that of a young American, wondering why his generation can produce such poetry and passion and yet still find a functioning illiterate in the White House. Willy works through the album steadily, throwing in older tracks along the way. There isn’t a huge difference between this album and the last, a fact which has led to criticism from some quarters. What happened though to the idea of constancy? How much can a 20-something’s world view change over 2 years? What does change is the confidence with which Willy Mason tells stories, like the son mourning his father in ‘The World That I Wanted’.

At the Carling Academy the crowd is almost reverential. “He’s fuckin’ brilliant inne?’ remarks one young man, who wouldn’t look out of place on page four of the Daily Mirror with a black rectangle over his eyes and ‘Asbo Teen’ as the headline. To say that the crowd is ‘mixed’ is an understatement of epic proportions. As Mason picks the opening bars of ‘Where The Humans Eat’ (the aforementioned cat song), a fifty-ish white haired man and a pierced emo teenager look at each other with glee as if to say ‘I love this one!’. A few rows in front stands a old school punk next to three shaven-headed lads in tracksuits. Seems that frustration, left wing politics, domestic animals and lilting ballads about the sea make up that elusive uniting force amongst the youth of Britain.

The band’s sound is balmy, full and responsive. Underpinned by gentle resonant bass lines and brush-struck drums the instrumentation rushes back and forth like a dying tide behind Mason’s raw moans. This is the sound of a long-touring band who have had time to adjust to each other and they never falter. After finishing the night with the much loved ‘Hard Hand To Hold’, Nina Violet fiddling for all she’s worth, Mason wanders back on stage to allow one more burst from the choir. ‘Heads or tails; So Long or Oxygen’ he says, flipping a coin. Of course he plays both, because he’s the nicest man in folk.

In the wake of the local elections the doom-mongers who wrung their hands over youth political apathy would have been heartened by the sound of 400 18 to 30 years olds singing ‘Justice, equality, freedom to every race’ at the top of their lungs. ‘Oxygen’, Mason’s own non-partisan manifesto draws the most joy from the steaming crowd. He has a habit of adapting and changing his third verse to ensure that his is the lone voice for at least a part of the sing-a-long anthem, announcing truths like a scruffy statesman while the throngs look on with pride.

Willy Mason – believe the hype and get your tickets early next time, or you might have to depend on him showing up to play in your living room.