CASS MCCOMBS
The Lantern, Bristol | January 8
We arrive slightly late. Colston Hall’s second room ‘The Lantern’ is filled with a silence that is offset only by the nervous laughter of a deeply southern American gent who appears to be tuning a banjo. We shuffle to our seats, muting our footsteps, acutely aware of the unfettered gaze of an audience bewitched by the character that sits on the stage before them. This man is Frank Fairfield, a musician whose presence might be described as Will Ferrell playing Daniel Day-Lewis playing Daniel Plainview.
After what feels like a good three hours of murmuring, giggling and tuning, Fairfield finally announces “I really didn’t think I’d have this much time to fill” before executing a near-perfect rendition of a classic American minstrel song, Bye, Bye My Honey I’m Gone, and before we’ve had time to throw our roses he picks up his violin, his battered old six string and his banjo and walks off stage without so much as a kiss goodbye. We’re as charmed as we are bewildered.
But it’s McCombs, that fabled nomad, that spinner of tales of the bleak American dream, whom the crowd have gathered to see tonight. As he struts into view we’re presented with less the apocryphal troubadour more the young man in a brown t-shirt surrounded by three slick session players. Nevertheless, not ones to be deterred by slightly bruised illusions, we attempt to look beyond the less than perfect image. What we’re treated to is, needless to say, both pleasant and serene. What is lost in some poorly judged sound mixing is more than made up for in the quality of the songs McCombs has crafted and he plays each one with the greatest skill and effortlessness. The set culminates with the untouchable County Line, a cut of Americana so lush and deep it’s almost criminal.
Unfortunately though, this professionalism, this relentless efficiency only succeeds in pulling the story we’d so desperately wanted to believe further from our grasp. The dream of the last real American cowboy is realised tonight, in many ways, by Frank Fairfield rather than our main man Cass, who is left looking somewhat like, well, a young man in a brown t-shirt surrounded by three slick session players.
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Words: Billy Black
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