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The title track of the album came next, and again we had pizzicato
work on the cello on Morning After. There
was a pretty guitar run and hook on Flying
and an expansive cello break on Bluebell,
before Natasha closed her set with Mean Girl, formerly recorded
with Pooka.
Mean Girl is a song that Natasha also lent
and performed in Honour And Reputation, a
play written and performed by the local All Across
The Arts writing group at Darwen Library
Theatre earlier in the year. Mean Girl
has a dramatic lyric and chorus, and in many ways is not a
typical Natasha Lea Jones song. She seems
less to construct her songs than to allow them free to meander
towards their own tune. This refreshing approach releases
beautifully melodic lines to weave in and out of her songs
as seemed to me to happen so frequently in the first two and
best two albums by Gomez. Many of Natasha’s
songs, although sharing quite that bluesy, country feel, capture
that great artistic joie de vivre that epitomised the early
Gomez.
As the audience filed out at the end of a full day’s
music programme I could hear only very positive mutterings
about Natasha’s set and Mean Girl in
particular.
I would
suggest, though, that there are things she still has to learn
as a solo-performing artist. Her verbal communication with
her audience didn’t begin until two songs from the end,
when a couple of cool stories about Bob Dylan
and Adam Ant (two artists you are unlikely
to ever see again in the same sentence!) showed how engaging
she can be.
As a writer and performer of so many uplifting songs
she could do to smile more on stage. With a voice that soars
like an eagle and swoops like a swallow she is a wonderful
vocalist and a fine guitarist, with much to smile about.
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