Gemma Hayes at Oslo Hackey 16/01/2015

Last time I saw Gemma Hayes live was 2002 at ULU. It was the very first time I saw her. She had just released her first album “Night On My Side” which it was great debut critically acclaimed and make her nominated for the mercury prize and considered the new big thing. I have listened that CD so much I could even imagine I could see her live and I  was in London just since few weeks.

ULU was as small venue owned by University of London, I remember taking a lot of shitty picture with an analogical camera, till the security guy ask me to stop, I remember her drummer breaking his stick playing “Let a Good Thing Goes”.

The performance was totally different from that one I attend few days ago at Oslo Hackney. In 2002 she was so fragile and shy she couldn't even answer to people who where shouting at her while she was explaining some of her song, which mostly refer to her private life and her struggling to find love. She was struggling to play “Lucky One” after she had introduced.

Last nigh at Oslo was kind of different. It’s been more then 10 years since then, she has gone through a lot of stuff. She is a mother now, she had played with band like Counting Crows, she wrote music for films and fictions, she is producing her music with Plege.com instead of an a major label.

She is not a big star, she is an normal person playing an extraordinary music. She much more confident now, so much that the gig could have been sound too professional to who saw her at a very begin of her career.

Not much space to the old stuff. “Back of My Hand” has been the only song from her first album, dated 2002. She opened the stage with “Waiting For You” and “Shock To My System” who she revealed to be written the same day with the same chords. Joke or reality? Who knows. Both  of them are great songs, so who really cares?

The gig last only about an hour, with a total of 13 songs played, most of the from her last two album.

I only discovered the day after that she was going to play another gig in London, at the Olympic Studios, which is exactly were I work. It will be a very intimate show as the room which host the event is really small. It’s going to be tonight and I can’t wait for it.

Set list from live in Oslo Hackney

Waiting For You - Let It Break

Shock To The System - Let It Break

Back Of My Hand - Night On My Side

Chasing Dragons - The Hollow of Morning

Making My Way Back - Bones + Longing

Ruin - Let It Break

Dreamt You Were Fine - Bones + Longing

Palomino - Bones + Longing

To Be Your Honey - Bones + Longing

All I Need - Let It Break

Keep Running - Let It Break

Encore

Happy Sad - The Roads Don’t Love you

Dark Moon - Bones + Longing

Neil Headphones

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all—a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.

     Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever it was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first-century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder. Give me something that stumps me for a moment, something that sends me scurrying off to the cyber reference library. Sometimes, when the computer seemed to whir for longer than usual, Duncan got the feeling that he’d set some kind of a challenge; but then one day, when he was stocking up his iPod with back catalog, it had taken nearly three minutes to obtain the track names for Abbey Road, and it was clear that any delay was due to a bad connection or something, and not because Neil Headphones was stumped. So recently Duncan had been taking pleasure in those rare occasions when Neil couldn’t help him, and he’d had to fill out the titles himself, even though it was boring. It meant that he was off the well-trodden paths and into the musical jungle.

[from "Juliet, Naked" by Nick Hornby]