‘Boats ‘n’ Hoes’ from the Step Brothers movie was the unexpected intro music that heralded Beth Hart’s entrance from the back of the hall; moving slowly through ‘her people’ while singing ‘Tell Her You Belong to Me’ and it had the feel of a boxer’s ring-walk as she made her way to the front to join her band.
Over the years, I’ve sometimes seen the fragile and vulnerable side of Beth overwhelm her on-stage and sometimes she’s stumbled or fallen, but tonight she seems fired-up, empowered and in full kick-ass mode from the start, powering through impassioned renditions of ‘Waterfalls’ and ‘When the Levee Breaks’. She’s accompanied by the imperious Tom Lilly on bass plus measured and soulful playing from long-time guitarist Jon Nichols and drummer, Bill ‘Motherf*cking’ Ransom, provides thunderous beats and exquisite fills but always with a delicate and dexterous feel for the complexities of the music, and together they provide the solid platform for Ms Hart to swoop and soar.
After prowling the stage like a feral cat for the first three numbers, Beth pulls out a stool and takes it down a notch with her own take on Melody Gardot’s ‘Your Heart is as Black as Night’. It’s a delightfully French-sounding smoky jazz number but delivered by Beth with chilling darkness; kind of like how the music from Disney’s ‘The Aristocats’ might have sounded if the movie had been directed by Tim Burton.
When introducing an emphatic and ballsy rendition of ‘Bad Woman Blues’, Beth teases with “can you guess who it’s about?”, before conceding that she’s got a good side too - “but I don’t show it because I don’t want people f*cking around with me”. The good side is no surprise to the audience, as we’d seen her go back into the crowd before the song to pluck a young couple “out of the cheap seats” to fill a gap in the front row and we all saw the delightful wee lassie that brought her drink out to the keyboard right before the show started.
You can tell that Beth varies her set-list to fit her mood and state-of-mind, especially when she makes a last-second switch to play ‘Love is a Lie’; another of her ‘angry’ songs, which she tells us she wrote about her Mum’s last husband as an alternative to killing him! That’s just one of the highly-personal and sometimes traumatic tales that Beth shares from the stage and weaves into her lyrics. She sometimes sucks on a bamboo straw while relating tales of addiction, abuse and mental warfare but she’s controlled and focused and singing magnificently without even needing to have the microphone close to her mouth, such is the clarity and power of her voice and her message. It’s a fully-immersive and all-consuming experience and her genuinely stunning performance of ‘War in my Mind’ proves that there is not a more authentic blues-singer on the planet right now.
I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not, but Beth brings an element of dry comedy to her introduction for ‘Rub Me for Luck’ which she says she wrote for Joe Bonamassa “although he’s not even my favourite guitar player”. It turns out he’s not even on the podium, as she lists Buddy Guy, the late Jeff Beck and Eric Gales as her top three. It might have been perceived as a zinging take-down but it’s probably just the same brutal honesty she brings to her music and self-analysis (and I’m sure Jon Nicholls wasn’t offended either)!
