(this is for you, David)
I was happily reading the Observer last Sunday morning whilst trying to ignore the clunking of the misloaded overloaded dishwasher, when I came across a section in the Music Magazine of a collection of articles by renown musicians on their own favourite musicians. There was the usual genre-defining behemoths and 'culturally significant' figureheads trying to out-lick eachother with their respective sycophantism, but suddenly I felt drawn to one in particular...(oh dear, here we go with the tangible link)...
Adele wrote on Etta James. At first, I thought, nice, reasonable, appropriate. But as Adele wrote about her experience seeing her live at BB Kings' in New York, I realised that I was also there, maybe. I had the fortune of seeing one of two performances she did at BB King's last year, and she was fantasticly funny, alive and singing with a kind of sexuality you don't normally clap but hoot hoot hoot at. We hooted. Though perhaps with not as much vigour as the Bostonian 20 stoner between his cavernous mouth fulls of BBQ chiken sitting...well...on me. I wish it had rather been Adele. Perhaps, we were closer than we realised...
The cherry on the cake for me in reading this article, however, was not Adele's erudite retelling of that night's performance, but its accompanying photograph. The black and white photograph a top the article was taken just after our gig at BB King's, and captures that moment perfectly. The venue and performance was incredibly intimate, with perhaps only a hundred in the audience sitting around tables in jazz-club lighting (and the obligatory smell of BBQ chicken). It is not common that an article can so resound so clearly with a memory of one's own, and so I thank Adele that I now have a momento of that evening to treasure.
Thank you, Adele.
Thank you, Etta.