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Beyond Nashville Concert Series
The Barbican Hall, London, 2 November 2001.

The Barbican Hall's a smart place, kind of like the Nico (ag I mean Artscape) if you could imagine it being glamorous there. From tonight onwards it will host the Beyond Nashville concert series, further exposing the past decade's burgeoning so-called alt.country/Americana (yes, I know, 'or whatever') scene to larger and larger crowds. If you can ignore the weirdness of seeing twisted 'for real' country/folk/rock/pop music being marketed as if it's a really good new chocolate bar, then tonight is the start of something really good.

The first misconception to be rubbed out is that 'alt.country' artists look like cowboys or something. A look around the lobby reveals some dude who looks like a cool, calm & neglected Wyatt Earp and another who's scampering around frantically, dreadlocks flailing in the aircon-breeze. Of course the Earp is a paying audience member, while be-dreadlocked whiteboy plays lap steel in sideshow act Noah John.

But Noah John will entertain after the fact, for now we're filing into the 2000 seater to get things going with madcap husband and wife team The Handsome Family. On stage it's just them and their laptop - which performs well throughout, virtually ignoring its high-hat and cymbals, starting a song early just twice. Brett and Rennie Sparks look like struggling thirtysomething stage actors, if you could imagine a pudgy Tarantino-lookalike and a pale librarian-type with a penchant for bad dresses being stage actors. So if you've never heard the music before, you'd be pleasantly surprised that they're not going to play electric harpsichord with their teeth all night.

Instead, their music's big, lush and laced with enough pop-sensibility to shame everyone from the Eurythmics to N'Sync. Brett's voice is big as the bellow of a bison (if they do bellow, that is), driving the songs along in a familiar twangy country way. But no stress, no Shania sentimentality. Instead, The Handsome Family steers clear of corporate Family Values, being essentially closer to an armed to the teeth sweatshop-busting mob in the Barbie-aisle at the Wal-Mart off Nasville's Music Row. Sporting tunes from their brand new Twilight album, as well as earlier landmarks off In the Air and Through The Trees, The Handsome takes the audience on a blow-torch-lit journey through their collective memory, creating tales of mystery and murder, wind and sleet and beauty and humour with equal ease. With just the two of them on stage, things get lonely when a guitar-string breaks, but Rennie's so at ease up there it's like she's at the hairdresser, calmly killing time with humourous stories which the audience lap up like whiskey&milk in a saucer.

By the time they've sung about all the little animals they killed during childhood, we're just about ready to rock it a bit harder. Up steps Jim White and his band, quietly riling the far too respectable crowd to 'ejaculate' from their seats whenever they feel the groove.

White's material tonight all comes from his latest No Such Place (the best rock album you'll buy this year) as well as its possibly even more twisted predecessor, Wrong Eyed Jesus. At least White plays the part for a while, briefly donning a white cowboy hat for our pleasure. He's a thin, tall bicycle spoke, wearing the kind of attire a disgruntled tractor driver might wear somewhere in the middle of Omaha. Of course he's an ex-surfer and ex-model from Florida, but there you go. White's essentially the new Tom Waits (though far more latter-era Waits than Swordfishtrombone-era), if there could be such a thing, only White doesn't yet sound like he starts every day with Hard Gravel Kellogs sprinkled with whiskey for milk and nicotine for sugar. His voice is tender but mean, taking to the harder rockers as easily as to the atmospheric dark, muggy-night ballads, which are a highlight of this show as well as his albums.

Like Waits, White knows how to write a song that can conjure up an entire parallel universe of outcasts and flip-outs smelling of burnt rubber and gunpowder. They're more than rhymes to music - they're short stories, crazy little movies, diary entries from the chapped, swollen, bleeding lip of that crazy place over the water. America's madness and sadness has never been told so engagingly. Look no further than 'Corvair', 'Christmas Day' and 'Handcuffed To A Fence In Mississippi' to discover that this man's something truly special. A set highlight is the classic 'God Was Drunk When He Made Me', here starting off like a hymn, then crashing into a barking, rocking confession at the Lord, who must be pretty perplexed looking down on it all. The show ends with White alone on stage, giving the crowd the chance to shout out requests, then making further tiny recommendations to the soul of every person in the venue. The crowd's appreciation is that of thirsty birds wishing they had hands to scoop water from a well, then finding someone who can do it for them.

But no such sentimental bullshit for most of us, as we file out of the venue, scamper off to the nearest tube to catch the night's last train home, with just the full moon and White's words of "now these are my people, my church without a steeple" to take us home to small beds and empty wallets. It's all good, really it is.