Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Velden am Wörthersee / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Concert date: May 20, 2013
Attendance: 40
Ticket price: €25.00
Dave Kilminster and Murray Hockridge are a venomous pairing of two British musicians whose heartfelt passion reaches way further than the average listener’s ear can pick up! They literally comb through your soul. Considering that up to this day, only a handful of people in Slovenia had even heard of Kilminster, and then only through the official promo copy for Roger Waters tours, where Dave plays live guitar, i.e. the »stand-in David Gilmour,« it’s not a bad idea to give you a »quick« intro to both of them first.
Murray Hockridge, who hails from the British city of Peterborough, is an outstanding jazz / rock / blues / soul singer who artfully pairs his exceptional vocal stamp with vivid acoustic folk guitar accompaniment – a mix of fingerpicking and classic strumming. The guy inherited his vocal chops from his late father Edmund, who was likewise regarded as a top-notch vocalist and stage performer/actor. For a few years Murray also worked with his brother Steve as a production duo in his brother’s studio. His path led him to Dave Kilminster, and in 2011 the two released an album of top-shelf acoustic covers of ultimate classic hits by various artists, »Closer To Earth,« which in one way or another represent their creative inspiration. In early 2012 Murray even threw himself into the talent battle (that’s the BBC’s »The Voice Of UK«), where, up against brutal competition from 30,000 applicants, he landed among the best forty.
Unlike Murray Hockridge, Dave Kilminster is a highly respected and well-known name in music circles that count. The guy started out on piano in the seventies, switched to guitar in the second half of the decade and began teaching it. Today he teaches at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford. Here’s a curious thing about this guitarist: he’s actually left-handed, but taught himself to play as if he were a regular righty. He picked up a serious right-wrist injury in a go-kart accident, which forced him to learn the right-handed style of guitar playing. Kilminster has been a regular columnist for »Guitarist« magazine for years. He has put out a heap of guitar instruction books and guitar-playing DVDs. The man has a doctorate in the guitar universe, no doubt about it. And his career so far? Guitarist in the live lineup of ELP’s Keith Emerson, then live guitarist on Roger Waters tours between 2006 and 2008 and 2011-2013. Known collaborations include John Wetton, Ken Hensley, Carl Palmer, Qiang, The Nice, Guthrie Govan,… John Young (Qango) once said of Kilminster that he’s the best guitarist since Hendrix. In short: Kilminster is considered one of the greatest musical talents and guitar wizards the British Isles have ever produced!
This time the visit to Bluesiana was below par. They had simply set up tables in the room where the stage is. Still, by the end there were some 40 heads in the place. Kilminster and Hockridge took the stage close to ten in the evening, hoping more people would show up. Whatever. They didn’t lose any sleep over the poor turnout. With the opening reinterpretation of Elton John’s standard Rocket Man, they hypnotized everyone in the room. Kilminster immediately made it clear he wasn’t a live guitarist on Roger Waters’ »The Dark Side Of The Moon« tours for nothing, because to rearrange Rocket Man he used the motif base of the opening phrase, built on slide guitar, from the Pink Floyd song Great Gig In The Sky. Kilminster held an e-Bow in his right hand, slipped a slide onto the finger of his left, and controlled his work with a gigantic volume pedal. He »solved« several songs this way, among them Losing My Religion (orig. R.E.M.), With Or Without You, and soon after, on the setlist, one of the most beautiful compositions in the Pink Floyd universe, Comfortably Numb, where he stunned the crowd with a relived closing solo on acoustic guitar. Magical and one of a kind! Murray fit right into this backdrop with his soulful vocals. The guy is phenomenal. He can stretch across three octaves, and his timbre is born for soul pop. He combines the colorful vocal acrobatics of singers like Prince and Stevie Wonder! Yes. There’s definitely something »black« in Murray. With his fantastic voice he floored us especially in songs like Hallelujah (orig. Leonard Cohen) – played in the Jeff Buckley version – then Move On Up (orig. Curtis Mayfield), Crazy (orig. Gnarls Barkley), the original Can’t Wait For The Summertime and Jesus To A Child (orig. George Michael).
This extraordinary vocal character, caught in a collage of superb accompaniment from both acoustic guitars and seasoned with flint-hard salt in the form of Kilminster’s guitar antics, drew out such powerful feelings and reactions that Dave Kilminster himself burst into tears after playing Hallelujah (later, in one of his between-song chats, he admitted: »Oh,… I’m such an emotional wreck tonight!«. After the two musicians reaped a huge ovation for Comfortably Numb, Kilminster said he was thrilled with the audience’s participation, because they were making a racket as if there were 10,000 people in front of the stage.
Kilminster also tried himself out as lead vocalist. And the vocals suit him very well! So we got to hear two original compositions from his solo album »Scarlet – The Director’s Cut« (2012), namely Just Crazy and, right before the end, Brightest Star. Only when reinterpreting Robert Plant’s lines, tackling the demanding Rain Song by Led Zeppelin, did he come across a bit less convincingly. In his intro before this fantastic song someone shouted »Stairway To Heaven,« and Dave reacted to the situation theatrically: »Who said that?!?!? » and pointed the way to the exit. Jokingly, of course.
Some of the covers came out so transformed in Murray’s and Dave’s hands that they sounded like entirely new songs. With Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower, it was practically impossible to figure out which song it was until nearly the first verse. Some songs, in Hockridge and Kilminster’s variety-show versions, even delivered more melody than the originals. That’s definitely true of the R.E.M. song Losing My Religion, as well as the just-mentioned All Along The Watchtower.
It was a concert experience that took your breath away. Organic, raw, natural! Just vocals, acoustic guitar and percussion. Completely stripped down and without makeup! No distortion whatsoever. Kilminster, of course, wove his outstanding guitar know-how into most of the songs, which boosted the dynamic range of the show and sustained the remarkably solemn atmosphere of Bluesiana’s especially intimate club space this time around. With a hyperplasia of passion and emotion. In a word: pure magic, yet another way of expressing feelings through the art of music! Let’s hope the two put out a new joint studio album, ideally with as much original material as possible, and that they swing by for new shows near Slovenia again as soon as possible!
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