WILLY MASON

We saw Willy Mason at the Band Room, Farndale the other week. I'd never heard anything by him, nor read about him, so went with no expectations. He was the most mesmeric new singer-songwriter I've heard in many a long day. Just acoustic guitar, voice and words. I didn't like all his songs but those I did like, and they were the great majority, really touched me. He had the freshness of the young Bob Dylan, but wasn't the slightest bit Dylanesque, even when the topics of his songs sometimes were. He had a highly engaging casual intimacy of manner onstage, his singing was somehow both plain and exploratory, and the words were, over and over again, radiant with emotional clarity, powered by imagery that was personal, convincing, marvellously free of cliche and of artsy pretence. The Band Room was the ideal place to see him: it holds 100.