A little help from his friends
By
Jack Massarik
22 Aug 2006
After losing his younger son in tragic circumstances late last year, Martin Taylor didn't touch a guitar for months. For his first London dates since then, he departs from his solo-virtuoso mode to get a little help from his friends, who last night were fellow guitarists Neil Stacey and Martin Simpson.
Though from different spheres, these three players were bonded by shared musicality and mutual respect. During the sprightly bridge of a Stacey original, El Fado, their acoustic-electric guitars blended together in an airy way strangely reminiscent for a few moments of Les Paul's multitracked classics.
Angel's Camp was a bluesy turnaround offering rich improvising pickings for its four chords. Taylor won that one on points but Stacey came back with a delicate half-chorus of Skylark, exploring Hoagy Carmichael's ballad at walking pace.
What the show then needed was a vocal, and Simpson provided it with Six Feet of Water in the Streets of Evangeline, a bittersweet Randy Newman ditty about the first Mississippi floods of 1927, when Washington didn't offer much help either. The set-closer, Ginger, was for Taylor's great-grandfather, a bare-knuckle prizefighter. Its stately theme suggested a fighter with plenty left in the tank. So too has Martin Taylor MBE.
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