Tuesday 09/08/05 Devendra Banhart, Espers, Josephine Barker @ Concorde 2, Brighton

A chock-full sell out night for Devandra Banhart and his Merry Prankster band in Brighton, familiar as the audience is to the wacky, it was with space-dust on top. Sobriety for the warm-up, the night opens with Josephine Barker from Colorado who fits snug into the folk-singer tradition with haunting vocals, airs of mystery, and lullaby cadences. Performing solo with an acoustic guitar, listening to Josephine is like listening to 'Sirens' spells being cast. While the songs varied little in style or delivery, many lasting for around seven minutes, the audience was silent and transfixed. Josephine would appeal greatly to lovers of Nico (Velvet Underground) though with a purer, more fragile and etheric beauty.

Next up was Espers, a 5-piece band from Philadelphia, which had the advantage of featuring a cello, otherwise it was self-indulgent, incoherent, away with the fairies on their lil' ole magic mushroom trip. Devendra Banhart and his band looked like a cross between raggle-taggle gypsys and ambassadors from 1960's Haight-Ashbury, on a mission from the Bush Admin to spread and ooze the love and peace spirit.

Devendra perfectly mimics the positive energy he feels tonight with wavey hands. A strident and entertaining evening from the start, it opens with a Mexican Mariachi song delvered in Spanish, full of twists and turns.'Heard Somebody' follows - an anti-war song from his forthcoming album - shows the political-humanist side to Devendra's songwriting. There's lots of impromptu fun and frivolity that must be part of the Californian psyche, chants of "broga" - like yoga, but acknowleging the sister/brother relation between us all. Plus the stage being given to anyone with a song. Big-up the generosity.

Devendra's style and singing is slightly glam-rock ande very Marc Bolan, and it's this genre that brings out the performer in Devendra, singing "Gonna have a good time, a real good time." strumming it loud and proud, or "Sho bop shou bop" on a clever song about wanting his child to have long hair so his head is warm in winter. The band show deft verstility in styles, switching from blues to folk, glam-rock (of course) to Cornbelt-Americana balladry, but then flair and originality is shown in the coupling of a Lauren Hill song with, ahem, a Charles Manson song about "you'll never be alone". Indeed.

The highlight though is Devevndra's wit and lyricism - abundant in 'At the Hop', '"Cook me in your breakfast, put me on your plate, cos you know I tast great"', and "I wanna lie in Jamaica and take off all my clothing", or encouraging the audience to do the chicken-dance to a song about "I feel just like a child" putting in a hard days fun, all delivered with that warbly Bolan-esque voice. Elsewhere, the clever-clogs song 'Little Yellow Spider', is the gag of the night. Delivered with animal accompaniment noises from the drummer lurking behind his equipment, the song details with eloquence, the idiosyncracies of animals with the audience applauding the verse about a squid, "You moooove so psychedelically". The band feature heavily throughout and represent a fuller sound with more gumption than the solo artist we know. The finishing number is about a schizophrenic hermoprodite, which proves just enough Minstrel entertainment for one night.

Photos by Rick Steven