Chris T-T and Tom White: Louisiana

Tuesday 3rd June 2008

This is a Crackerjack review of Chris T-T and Tom White . Do you agree? Rate and review this event.

Crackerjack rating: 7 / 10.

Tom White's songwriting credentials are certainly not in doubt - the precocious Brightonian wasn't even old enough to vote when he and his brother Alex released their excellent first album as Electric Soft Parade.

He's also a reliable gun-for-hire (guitarist for Brakes, drummer for The Restlesslist) but this co-headlining tour is his first outing as a solo performer.

The first half of his set consisted of some fairly straightforward acoustic tracks, but Tom had added a visual element with a series of grainy film clips that were projected over him and the entire stage - intriguing but not so distracting that it took away from the songs and his gorgeous voice. He added some whistling in too, not something you hear a lot of in modern pop music.

Then Tom switched from guitar to keyboard and laptop, and things took a very different turn. Long, experimental, and mainly lyric-less tracks like I Dream Of Black were hypnotic, with Tom holding notes like a choirboy along with synth-generated strings.

He finished with a version of the Irving Berlin song You Can Have Him that was nothing less than startling.

Relatively old hand Chris T-T (pictured) has probably done scores of tours as a solo operator by now but here he’d beefed up his sound with a band.

His set was mostly taken from his most recent, highly acclaimed album Capital, full of songs of modern malaise that can be wry, funny, personal or political.

Open Books is superficially about reading maps and arguing with your other half, but also a metaphor for the confusion of life. Let's Do Some Damage meanwhile is a pretty different relationship song - this one about splitting up which marries a beautifully melancholic verse to a bitter and furious chorus.

Chris gave the band a break (they sat on the floor on the stage) as he performed the M1 Song a capella - a folky fable about the trees that were torn down to build Britain’s first motorway in the 1950s. It's far from a naive hippy tale though, the opening and closing verses also subtly acknowledge the necessity of these roads.

He's a smart operator but he  wears his learning and his anger lightly as proven by this entertaining and heartening show.

Helen Sloan

This is a Crackerjack review of Chris T-T and Tom White . Do you agree? Rate and review this event.