Take a bow
STEVE ROTHERY BAND
VENUE THE JUNCTION, CAMBRIDGE
DATE 24/02/19
SUPPORT SYLF, RICCARDO ROMANO, THE DAVE FOSTER BAND
“It’s all rather uplifting: three-decade-old songs performed with a verve that belies their age, for an audience determined to savour every moment.”
Last year Steve Rothery took his Collection Of Musical Curiosities shows to Uden in The Netherlands and Łód in Poland, and tonight it’s lucky Cambridge. It’s an event that gives the Marillion guitarist the opportunity to revisit two of the band’s most popular albums – Misplaced Childhood and Clutching At Straws – without involving either the singer who stamped his authority on those songs first time round, or the singer who’s done the same to everything they’ve released since. It’s also an event that allows Rothery to surround himself with musicians and support acts that make onstage changes straightforward but form a decidedly complicated Venn diagram: musicians come and go, and each band performing is a permutation of the others.
Prog visits on the second night, when support comes from Sylf (featuring Rothery’s daughter Jennifer), Riccardo Romano (his keyboard player), and Dave Foster (his guitarist). Romano actually plays in all four bands, while singer Martin Jakubski (from tribute act StillMarillion) comes and goes as required. Like we said, it’s complicated.
Sylf, winners of the Best Unsigned band in the most recent Prog Readers’ Poll, are up first, introduced by a grinning Rothery as featuring “a very talented artist who just happens to be my daughter”. Kicking off with a cover of Mazzy Star’s spooky goth country classic Fade Into You is a smart choice, giving Jennifer a clear way to ease into the set, and while she might not yet look completely comfortable in the spotlight – or hit all the notes with absolute precision – she has the kind of sensual, otherworldly voice that David Lynch likes to showcase in Twin Peaks. Opia explores similarly spooky territory, as does Northern Star, although the prettiness of the latter is rather marred by a sudden, deafening buzz from a rogue cable.
After a few minutes spent fixing the equipment, the band reappear in lightly reconfigured form, with Riccardo Romano moving from behind the keyboards to take his place upfront. As befits a man whose adventurous B612 album was inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book The Little Prince (the story of a pilot who crash lands in the Sahara Desert and runs into someone visiting Earth from their home asteroid), what follows is pretty dramatic. Romano explains everything in the kind of charming, faltering English we’re used to hearing from Italian football managers newly arrived in The Premiership, and there are costume changes aplenty. The Lamplighter finds him wearing a cloak and waving a gas lamp around, and he dons flying suit and goggles for Dragonfly. The highlights are The King, in which Martin Jakubski makes his first appearance – wearing cloak and crown, bringing some George Melly-style swazz to proceedings – and the closing Babylonia, in which soaring guitar solos are matched to footage of the 9/11 towers burning.
Jakubski returns twice during the following set from the Dave Foster Band, duetting with Dinet Poortman on Counting Down The Days and Anything, but it’s Foster himself who captures the attention. He’s one of those guitarists who can pull off almost anything without apparently breaking sweat, switching from thudding riff to delicate strum or swooping solo with deft abandon. Amitriptyline is backboned by an utterly demonic riff but also features a ringing solo filled with clever little slides and bends, while Black Sunrise is a drawn out epic with Kashmir-style crescendos and plenty of precision noodling. Impressive.
Foster plays literal second fiddle to his boss as the Steve Rothery Band hit the stage, kicking off their set with four songs from the Ghosts Of Pripyat album. It’s typical Rothery – thoughtful, deliberate, flawlessly played – although there’s a slightly fraught moment at the beginning of Yesterday’s Hero where his guitar fails and the band pick up the slack until a replacement arrives.
All this is but an amuse-bouche to the main course, , performed in its entirety in the original order (albeit briefly augmented by Fish’s chant). There’s a lusty audience singalong in , finds bass player Yatim Halimi bouncing from. , complete with screwed-up intro. . . Pandemonium. Delirium. And home to bed.
