Guile – The Tackeroo, Cannock, 10th February 2012

Hometown gig, expectant crowd.  The last thing any band want is a string to go on the bass about 6 seconds into the gig.  With no spare bass guitar.  Which is exactly how Guile’s return to their Cannock roots kicked off.

A lot of bands would have been thrown, or perhaps just walked off until running repairs could be made.  No such easy way out for Guile.  While bassist Adam ‘Fish’ Shaw, showed commendable grace under pressure restringing and tuning up with the minimum of fuss, the remaining members of Guile simply slipped into dirty, vaguely threatening, blues jam.  Shut your eyes and you’d believe Link Wray was about to walk onstage.


It’s a scene that’s been played out at numerous gigs of course, but the economy and assuredness with which Guile took this unpromising start in their stride spoke volumes for a band confident in their abilities and totally at ease onstage.

With a nod from the restrung bassist, the band slipped seamlessly into their set, their impromptu jam could almost have been a pre-coda to the rolling menace of opener ‘Red Mist’.  Underpinned by Gaz Slater’s powerful drum pattern, ‘Red Mist’ is a slow burner, allowing the band to gradually flex their considerable aural muscles, it builds and grows to a climax of howling guitars, with the insistent soloing of Jon Sawyer fighting its way into your head above the crunching rhythmic juggernaut.

Feeding off their own momentum Guile kick into ‘No Silence’.  One of their oldest songs, now completely re-worked, lyrically it evokes Shelly’s Ozymandias, transplanted to the blasted industrial desert of the former coalfields and soaked in sour mash bourbon – nodded at by frontman Neal Sawyer’s re-appropriation of a verse from Folsom Prison Blues midway through the song.

Sacrilege?  In almost anyone else’s hands it might well be, but Guile have the confidence and the understanding of the musical lineage that informs them to carry it off.  It also helps that in Neal Sawyer they have a compelling frontman, blessed with a world weary, cracked timbre to his voice that speaks of long dark nights with only a bottle for company.

Previously compared to The Saints Chris Bailey in terms of the sound and delivery of his vocals, Neal is now developing an almost Mark Lanegan-esque register, albeit with more range, as the screaming, pleading, despair of his vocal on the almighty cacophony of set closer ‘Alone On The West’ proves.

Moving through the gears with ease Guile continue to produce more than the sum of their parts.  Yes there’s the swagger of the Mary Chain, Stone Roses or Primal Scream.  There is most definitely a love of the blues that stretches from Robert Johnson to Led Zeppelin, with more than a pinch of west coast psychedelia and a twin guitar attack that can summon up the spirit of the MC5, but like all great bands there is a chemistry that makes Guile special.

From the pastoral introspection of ‘Somewhere, Sometimes, Someone’ to the irresistible riffing of recent single, ‘Deep By The Dockery’ Guile’s brutal Black Country blues is by turns soulful, brooding, but ultimately uplifting.

Tonight’s set felt like something of a full stop.  With an album recorded and ready for release in May and a set full of the songs that are likely to be on it, the band gave a peek into the future with two newer songs for an encore.  ‘You Kill, We Dream’ and ‘I Wish I Was Heartless’ blew away any sense that Guile have peaked.  If anything these are rawer, more passionate slabs of English country punk’n’blues from a band previously considered one of the best unsigned acts on the circuit.

Well now they have a deal, this criminally under rated band really ought to get the recognition they deserve.  Or to mis-quote Morrissey ‘The more you ignore Guile, the closer they’ll get’.  

Something is stirring in the old Staffordshire coalfields...



For all things Guile, go to
www.guilemusic.co.uk
and
http://soundcloud.com/guilemusic