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You have to wonder which rock people who consider Johnny Flynn a 'new' act to be have been under.
A capacity crowd is squeezed into the Camden Barfly to see Mechanical Bride on warm-up duty. Lauren Doss’s creation comes over like a melancholy Regina Spektor stumbling across a couple of hobos busking sadly on a darkened street corner, and joining them for a jam. “Are you a believer?” they ask in the stand-out closing number. We could be persuaded.
Johnny Flynn has been a touring theatre actor, a musician, and a film star (in Holland at least) in his 26 years of life so far, so the solo show that he is playing here tonight shouldn’t hold too much trepidation for him. Still, as he opens with 'The Wrote & The Writ', it’s clear that it takes something special for one person to command the attention of an audience for an entire set, at least for a musician who is usually heard with a full band. It’s also clear that Flynn possesses that something in spades.
He is one of those few individuals who seem to be able to tap into life’s universal truths, whose understanding of the world seems to be drawn from centuries rather than a few short years of existence, and who can then distil all this into a few lines that resonate with all of us, and make them rhyme to boot. Channelled through a whisky-cracked voice that you don’t get tired of listening to, and accompanied by a steel guitar which seems to make each note chime in chorus, and you’ve got the magic ingredients that make for a long and happy living in the music industry, if there is any living to be made from it any more.
Tonight there is a run through of the highlights of debut album A Larum, a couple of tracks from the Sweet William EP that followed it, and a couple of new offerings. The Box gets the crowd moving, Tickle Me Pink has them singing along en masse, while Shore To Shore and particularly Brown Trout Blues, in which he pulls off that Bob Dylan trick of playing to whatever time signature feels right at the time, have them rooted in admiration. On the couple of occasions when he forgets his lines, there are enough members of the audience who know every word of every song that he is soon put back on track.
Johnny Flynn might be the next big thing to HMV, but for the punters of Camden Barfly he has already well and truly arrived.
