JD McPherson @ Gorilla, Manchester, 27 Feb
Averting our minds from the snow and cold outside, JD McPherson brings a warm air of Tulsa rock'n'roll to Gorilla's intimate stage tonight
Within about thirty seconds of JD McPherson and his band taking to the intimate Gorilla stage, the sardine-packed audience has forgotten all about the snow and the cold and the people stuck on the M62. They may as well have been flown all the way to McPherson’s hometown of Tulsa, circa 1955. We're in rock'n'roll country and rock’n’roll is all that matters, leastways for the duration of the set.
They kick off with Bossy from second album Let the Good Times Roll and it’s a doozy, a song that is both period and contemporary that you could imagine being covered by either Elvis Presley or Janelle Monáe. Such is McPherson’s charm. We then skip back, figuratively and literally – with Fire Bug from debut Signs and Signifiers, which feels more straightforwardly Sun Records – and forward to Desperate Love and Crying’s Just a Thing You Do from latest album Undivided Heart and Soul.
McPherson has tunes that draw roars and whoops from the crowd (Head Over Heels is a great example, a song that takes the rock'n'roll template and fuzzes it up via some kind of White Stripes analog amp), and then there are a handful of moments (one occurs during Hunting for Sugar from the new record) when you start to wonder: is JD McPherson and band the rock’n’roll equivalent of Mexrrissey? Is it just homage? No doubt they do a great impersonation of rock’n’roll, but are they just the twenty-first century equivalent of the Stray Cats? This then leads to tortured comparisons with the likes of Gallon Drunk, a genuine, low down and dirty rock’n’roll proposition – and you think: JD McPherson and band are no Gallon Drunk.
But then we hit Let the Good Times Roll's title track and another high point, and you realise JD McPherson is doing what Kacey Musgraves is doing over in the country world: providing people who love this kind of music with more music, new music, that sounds like the music they love. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There should be a place for that, right? It’s just, and perhaps this is the most important thing to say, they are at their best when they somehow fuse the old time rock’n’roll with something that sounds like it could only be made now. And the best thing is, in closing out the show with Bloodhound Rock and Wolf Teeth, you sense they agree. Maybe, just maybe, McPherson's best is yet to come.