Song, by Toad

The Willard Grant Conspiracy – Live, Edinburgh Queen’s Hall, Thursday 15th May 2008

The Willard Grant Conspiracy are one of my favourite bands and I have now seen them play as a rock band, I’ve seen Robert Fisher perform solo and now I can add the Pilgrim Orchestra to the list.

Pilgrim Road, the new Willard Grant Conspiracy album, is the first to make heavy use of orchestration and, when I talked to him about it after the show, Robert said he felt that the tour needed to make a statement. His attitude is that if you’re going to do something really different it would be a waste just do a standard tour and I think he’s right. The impact of the new material would be, if not lost, diluted somehow by just doing a straightforward band tour.

It’s just a shame that, having heard older material in both the other two formats, that there wasn’t time to give more old songs the Pilgrim Orchestra treatment. Again, Robert has a response that makes perfect sense: that when an album is conceived as a whole and the songs live together they might lose something by being broken up and sprinkled across a Greatest Hits setlist. So other than Distant Shore, the truly gorgeous Fare Thee Well and Soft Hand all of which appear at the end of the set, there’s barely anything from the older albums. Distant Shore is an interesting one actually. It’s from Pilgrim Road’s incendiary predecessor and is presumably rather directly related to the US invasion of Iraq, but it’s actually quite an old song these days. Have we really been stuck in that humiliating debacle that long? Christ.

You sense that Robert Fisher has real pride in the new songs. The bold, risky step to tour with such a large band is one obvious result. Beyond a couple of big, shiny exceptions bands do not make money touring, contrary to popular myth, and setting off on a national tour with this many people is taking a risk that shows great dedication to giving the music the respect it deserves. Choosing the Queen’s Hall is another. Apparently the ageing, functional grandeur of the building has been in the minds of Fisher and his co-conspirator Malcolm Lindsay since they dragged this record out of gestation and into the workshop four years ago.

On the night, without knowing much about the financial success of the show, the muscial side is a triumph. The gentle lilt to a lot of the music makes a disarming juxtaposition to the anger in the lyrics. Musically it’s sadder than it is angry, and seems to comfort rather than twist you. Regard the End was grief-stricken, Let it Roll was raging, and this seems more resigned. For what was essentially a skeleton orchestra they managed to re-create the rounder, fuller sound of the album incredibly well, although given half of them actually play on the recordings that should not be a surprise.

But really, the core of any Willard Grant Conspiracy album is of course Robert Fisher’s amazing voice. If anything, irrespective of the arrangement of the music, what communicates the emotional core of the songs is his voice, and that is the reason I will always go and see them when they play here. Bloody marvellous.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Pugilist
Willard Grant Conspiracy – Soft Hand
Willard Grant Conspiracy – Distant Shore

website | hype | amazon