Skyscraper Stan – Tuning Fork October 10, 2015 (Concert Review)

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Oct-10

Last time I saw Skyscraper Stan he was opening up for — and utterly outclassing, in the process — Holly Arroswmith. That night, also at the Tuning Fork, about a month ago, Stan shared the stage with just Oskar Herbig, his cousin and guitar player. Last night he was back with his band the Commission Flats, for a headlining show.
And what a show it was. A short set — a dozen songs, plus one in the encore, Stan put on a quite remarkable performance that deserved a much larger audience than the one that didn’t quite fill the Tuning Fork last night. But those of us who were there saw an hour of highly enjoyable, intricately-crafted and tightly-performed songs with sharp, intelligent lyrics played and sung by a band that, even though this was, drummer Oscar Henfrey told me after the show, the first time they’d performed on stage together, were relaxed and clearly enjoying the show.
The music wasn’t always the easiest to pin down — as Stan pointed out at one point, “You’ve had the skiffle, the ballad, they boppity ones.” Bruce was played as a beautiful duet between Stan and Herbig, while Any Way You Please, which Stan tried to tell us was “The most Americana song of the evening — the is an Americana festival, after all,” was pure skiffle, from Henfrey’s chugging drums to Herbig’s reverb-heavy low-E-string riffing. Chief was a tight, bluesy little number, Stan’s acoustic fingerpicking in the verse giving way to Herbig’s stomping rock guitar in the chorus; Oskar’s a talented guitarist, and on Chief he, just briefly, slipped into full-on guitar-hero mode, thrashing his black solid-body Gretsch. Bruce had shades of Martin Stephenson and the Daintees, while show-closer Elvis had Herbig’s guitar straying close to Hank Marvin territory.
But regardless of the genre, Stan and the Flats played a mean show. William Henry Hayes — a song about “a pirate from Christchurch — no shit!” — built to a magnificent crescendo, Stan’s alarmingly long legs and arms flailing around a stage that was barely large enough to contain him. Tango, too, saw Stan putting his guitar down to, one presumes, tango with himself as he sang about a place where “they’ve got late-night kerbside cockfights, they’ve got your shoes and wallet,” Herbig chopping out a pleasingly filthy rhythm.
The addition of Henfrey on drums and Jan Bangma on bass gave Stan’s sound a depth that added an extra dimension to songs like Always Thinking About You and Woody Guthrie, and a bottom end that Herbig’s electric guitars needed. But I Fell Over is bleak and empty enough to need a pared-back arrangment, and his band left Stan alone on the stage with his acoustic guitar — William Henry Hayes “tired everyone out; they’ve gone for a break” — to sing a dark, sad song of drinking, before Herbig returned to the stage for Bruce.
And then came the high point of the show. Some Skyscraper Stan songs benefit from the presence of a full band, but in the final analysis this was a double-act, and nowhere was this more evident than Dancing On My Own Grave, Stan and Oskar’s guitars playing off each other as Stan told the story, possibly autobiographical — he’s not letting on, but self-destruction does seem to be a theme common to a number of his song — of a life in the process of being wasted. Stan doesn’t need a backing band, but he knows how to use one. He took the stage alone for Last Year’s Tune, the encore, with Herbig, Henfrey and Bangma joining him when the song needed them.
Skyscraper Stan and the Commission Flats weren’t originally scheduled to open the Tuning Fork’s Southern Fork Americana Festival. But The Eastern pulled out a few weeks ago, and Stan and the Flats were drafted in. Stan did apologise to the audience for not being The Eastern, even claiming that most of the setlist — “make it heavy, heavy, soulful, Oscar on drums has told me” — was covers of The Eastern songs. But the show was all Stan Woodhouse compositions, and what a show it was.

Steve McCabe

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Set list
Woody Guthrie
Always Thinking Of You
Melody
Tango
William Henry Hayes
I Fell Over
Bruce
Dancing On My Own Grave
Any Way You Please
Chief
Elvis
[encore]
Last Year’s Tune

 

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