![]() At Caught By the River three days previously, where he played with a full band, he described himself as being “like a narc at a Phish show”, after asking the audience how they were doing just a little too brightly. Even later, he will joke: “I’m sweating like a stepdad at a sporting event,” before spooling out the night’s climactic workout, Summer Dress. “Working out my daddy issues on the stage, right now!” Later, he will mime the gurning, bear-like stagger of a drunken British teenager he once asked for directions. Then the spell is broken, and Walker grins wickedly. ![]() The song, one of the best on the new album, has been an uneasy meander around a romance, markedly more rugged and questing than the recorded version. He strums emphatically, he yips, goes off into another arpeggio, and ends abruptly with a final, violent prang of the guitar. He ebbs, he flows, he sweats, he shakes his hair he looks like he has not had a day of sunshine in years, or any nutrients other than chips. The racket coming off the stage belies the over-polite tang of the jazz-folk tag Walker acquired with his last album ![]() Later in the set he’ll cover Tim Hardin’s If I Were a Carpenter. Through those fingers flow many woody and august antecedents: difficult homegrown masters like John Martyn or Bert Jansch, wayward American travellers like John Fahey, more canonical voices like Tim Buckley the jazzy post-rockers of his adopted Chicago.
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