NOW HEAR THIS - Rich Webb
Words by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Friday 9th December 2022
Photos by: Ian Laidlaw
Five Recommendations from the Melbourne Troubadour
Had a big day? It’s been the year for it! Fortunately, we’ve got just the remedy. Sit back, relax, and lose yourself in new music from Melbourne-based troubadour Rich Webb. The release of his new album Right! seemed like the perfect excuse for SENSE to get in touch and find out five pieces of art he thinks you should check out.
Blaze Foley – Clay Pigeons
My brother Dave is a mighty fine musician and sent me the John Prine version of Clay Pigeons a couple of months ago. I couldn’t stop playing it. It’s a majestic piece of songwriting and John nails it, like he always does. A beautiful song and Prine’s version is wonderful. Check that out for sure. And then, last week, through the magic of YouTube, this version came on my radar. It’s the original songwriter Blaze Foley playing the track on an acoustic guitar on a porch somewhere what looks like a few decades ago at least. There are no details. I like things with a dusting of real. I like to hear the valves, the squeak of a piano stool, the earth and soul of a recording. You lose more than you gain by getting rid of all of that stuff for mine. There is plenty of that here. It’s not a spec recording by any means and under two minutes long. But from the heart in the performance to the unsmoked cigarettes over both ears, it’s an absolute gem. Everyone wants to write a song this good.
Faces Places
I was in London five or six years ago and walked into a brilliant exhibition by French photographer and street artist JR about New York’s Ellis Island, America’s largest immigration centre in the early 1900s. He’d beautifully humanised the story by printing massive images of some of the millions who had passed though there and pasted them onto walls and parts of the detention centres themselves. He also filmed Robert De Niro on site narrating a story around this. It was quite brilliant. What he does is exceptional, thoughtful and human. He makes people the size of buildings, or places where they work. I love what he does. Five or six years ago he teamed up with the much older French filmmaker, screenwriter and artist Agnes Varde to go on a trip around France in a van doing just that. This film is gentle, understated and also insightful and incredibly moving. The generational interplay between these two legends is lovely too. Love it.
The Royle Family
The first three seasons of this sitcom in particular are magic. Most of it is set in front of the telly in the lounge room of the Royle’s two-up, two-down on a Manchester council estate. It’s a wonderful and loving portrayal of family life in the north of England and the people around it, despite the continual joshing. While they push the characters out, it rings true. I know – I was there, and that’s what makes it so funny. They nailed it here. The OASIS theme tune is great too.
Joan Didion – Play it as it Lays
I’ve just got into this brilliant American author after reading this astonishingly clear, razor-sharp book. There isn’t an ounce of fat anywhere in this as Joan artfully and wonderfully nails the ennui that can happen around too much of a good thing and not enough imagination. I’ve just ordered three more of hers. That’s Christmas right there.
Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch
I could have picked many other books here but went for this one, in part because it’s a brilliantly written, immersive story that includes a stolen piece of artwork that’s beautiful in itself. The Goldfinch is a painting by Carel Fabritius, a Dutch painter in the 1600s and one of Rembrandt’s pupils. It gets stolen in the book. This is a crime novel, coming of age story and art history piece all on one, impeccably woven together. Haven’t seen the film that followed yet, though not sure I want to, but I am definitely going to see the painting in a museum in the Netherlands next time I’m over that way.
Rich Webb’s new album Right! is out now.
