Steve White Trio + Matt Deighton @ The Cluny, Newcastle - April 10

Steve White (drums); Chris Hague (bass, guitar, vocals); Joel White (keyboards, vocals)

I’ve never had to park so far away when visiting the Cluny in the past. This, it turned out, was not because of the pulling power of Mr White’s Trio but because Ouseburn is on the up with more pubs and bars than I’ve seen before. Inside the Cluny the background music is impassioned northern soul and the funk of Mr James Brown. The quality of the music did not, however, inspire the audience to dancing.

Nine of the clock sees the band on stage and rolling into the driving r’n’b of album opener Camera Obscura and its steady piano pulse. It’s tight and urban with occasional diversions into something more pastoral; Steve W solid at the back with frequent wilder flurries. From there, they are straight into an organ driven blues march. It’s pure ‘60s but could do with a guitar to slash and burn over the top. The swirling organ keeps the energy and momentum up. Steve’s pummelling solo keeps the rhythm driving and explodes around it, ending with a wave of cymbals. Then it’s into some driving urban funk with the organ leading from the front, swirling and swinging like musical aeronautics; lots of snap and pop like the soundtrack to a 60 year old spy caper.

Steve told us about his first visit to Newcastle with The Style Council to appear on The Tube and how he’d been out today visiting old haunts before introducing Passing Through which, with lyrics, was the theme tune to The Madam Blanc Mysteries on the telly. (White’s wife, Sally Lindsay stars in it). It’s a gentle soulful ballad, sung by Joel, all about the first time lovers do this or that.

If It Were All Down To Me is in the sweet spot where jazz, funk and soul meet. Underpinned by stabbing piano with plaintiff vocals, it was written with The Blow Monkeys’ Dr Robert as part of a collaboration called Monks Road Social. White’s drum solo teases with repetition before he explodes to shouts of ‘Go on, Whitey!’ from someone behind me. Ever Changing Moods is, according to Steve, a tribute to the Style Council in the style of minimalists Khruangbin. A wailing organ gives way to rolling, percussive piano with decorative right hand flurries before the organ wails back in. Just Be True is a ‘soppy soul song about love’ with the repeated line “Just between us, it’s all for you”. Soulful it is, pushed along by a heavy, rhythmic organ line.

A medley follows combining When The Tourists Leave (about the end of the season on the North Yorkshire coast (I’ve lived in Scarborough, been there, seen that) with Song For Us Dads. The first part is a melancholic piece enhanced by Hague’s acoustic classical guitar. It’s all very dark, damp streets, film noir. Dads, by way of contrast swings along to a bossa beat with the plucked guitar chiming through some lovely piano flourishes from Joel. For the next tune support act Matt Deighton returns to the stage to plug in an electric guitar for a piece of storming stop/start funk, possibly called Changing. The guitar fills the gaps and adds an edge and additional ferocity, Steve’s driving, furious drum solo is again employing repetition and joyful release and escape. The drum solo has raised the temperature in the room as the Trio launches into a high tempo Nothing’s Going To Last Forever with drums still sounding louder than they were before. This is followed by another slab of widescreen organ led funk with Steve now charging into his drum fills and the organ building on that.

Steve explains that, after leaving The Style Council, he was approached by Jon Lord, best known as the keyboard player in Deep Purple, and that he had worked and toured with him for three years. I was fearful that we might get a 20 minute run through Space Trucking (as on DP’s Made in Japan) but instead we had a bit of early Purple in the more psychedelic Hush with some ferocious organ playing. A blistering, rapid-fire, blurred sticks drum solo took us into The Style Council’s Shout To The Top which had half the audience singing along and cutting a stomping groove – the most they, and I, had moved all evening.

When Deighton joined them for Changing (?) the previous holes in the sound became more apparent. Most organ trios have drums and organ plus another lead instrument, usually sax or guitar to provide that contrasting voice (with the keys taking on the extra rhythm duties) and it also works to give another direction and more options to the music. The Trio, as it is, is the foundation of an absolutely storming soul review; they just need a few more instruments and a few more voices to really fill the room. (Probably too expensive to tour such an ensemble, though).

Before the main turn, Matt Deighton had provide a half hour of folky wooden music. Perched on his stool he explained that his voice has gone so he wouldn’t be singing tonight. (He tried and abandoned the effort with one song). What he did play featured complex melody lines, increasingly knotty and tight, which he would release with a single strummed chord before he launched into another run. No lack of interest despite the fact that we had to guess what the songs might be about. Dave Sayer