We burst through the door into the tiny backroom of the Water Rats just as Barbarossa is putting his set to bed, dragging the hum of conversation with us from the bar into the space with the stage and the amps.
Immediately, I get the feeling that we have disturbed something that has been pulled together tight over the half-hour or so that preceded our arrival. It takes little time to see why our entrance turned heads: James Mathe plays guitar like a gentleman ties his shoelaces and this audience is his; now they're trapped with the timbre rattling gently between the walls of his throat. So, apologies Barbarossa - next time I'll try to hear the whole of 'Seven Years'. It sounded like hot stuff! I'll make sure my phone's on silent, too.
Not much happened in between sets. We got ourselves another drink and took a seat on the wooden floorboards near the stage due to weary limbs and a dearth of chairage. Johnny Flynn appears, with his band - I think he introduced them as The Sussex Players. If I'm wrong then there's a band somewhere - probably Sussex - with their name in bold, and I don't know if they deserve it.
What strikes me first about Johnny is his lack of concession to trend or to 'time'; in the sense of epochs and eras. You'd find it hard to find in his music the blueprints of modernity that other bands use to help place themselves - but then, there are as many that struggle with technology as struggle without it. Tonight, the urge for FLASH! gives way to a kind of timelessness that arrives as notions of irrelevance and general dowdiness are overcome, easily. A violin, a mouth organ and an ukulele (I think) all adding to the rolling bale of hay that gathers momentum on songs like 'Tickle Me Pink'; and not once do these instruments sound like an unnecessary novelty.
Unfortunately, this is the first time I've seen Johnny Flynn, and I have no idea what many of the songs before 'Tickle Me Pink' - which is the last, tonight - are called. What I do know is that he managed to hold my attention for the entire set, while dirty feet tapped just inches away from my face. As things drew to a close, I thought of standing up to clap, and then imagined that giving a standing ovation at a folk gig would be like forming a tribute act to the last - and I mean the red-sky baiting, axis-crippling, solar apocalypse type of 'last' - band on earth; whoever that may turn out to be. So I stayed seated on the wooden boards 'til the end.
Cats and Cats and Cats were next up, and I don't doubt that they were right when they described this as one of the most eclectic bills they had played on of late. Their ultra-ultra-ultra-tight post-rock worked desperately yet seemed effortless as it mounted dizzying peaks and sorrowful troughs, six members teetering, somehow, in harmony like the struts holding up a futurist circus big-top. In short, they're a bunch of show-offs; but they know it, they're great at it, and it suits them. This evening, though, belonged to Johnny Flynn. Pared-down folk - as wet as that sounds, it wasn't - felt right for such a rainy, sunken London Sunday night.
