Haunting: the ghost of Johnny Cash, who played this venue in 1991, was a presence throughout this week’s very accomplished tribute act at the Fairfield Halls
CROYDON COMMENTARY: The music-loving public expect better and the venue deserves better than a stream of tribute acts, says KEN TOWL
Clive John is a very good singer and he was an engaging presence on the stage of the Ashcroft Theatre on Tuesday. He sang one of his own songs, “September”, and this was well-received. But everything else he performed were covers of tracks made famous long ago by the man whose images were projected on to the backdrop behind him.
The Ashcroft Theatre is part of the Fairfield Halls, potentially the south-east’s premiere live music venue, at least for tribute acts, and we were being treated to the Johnny Cash experience (“The Johnny Cash Roadshow: Sin and Redemption”) in which John’s voice and stagecraft delivered a machine-gun barrage of favourites from the Cash songbook from the 1950s onwards.
The set leaned heavily on the older songs, starting off with “Cry, Cry, Cry” and “Hey Porter”, and it became clear that John was not a Cash impersonator but rather has a voice of his own, perhaps a little more tuneful than the original but without some of the richness of the Cash baritone.
Crowd-pleasers: Clive John, left, dressed in black, has a voice of his own
What John was able to deliver was Cash’s attitude, style and energy.
The focus on the classics, such as “Ring of Fire” ( a stomping, audience-on-their-feet finale), “I Walk The Line” and “Orange Blossom Special” (featuring Cash’s original harmonicas) meant that the Rick Rubin years were under-represented, apart from a heart-rending version of “Hurt”.
This slow song, featuring a tremolo-laden voice and dark, painful lyrics that resonated with Cash at the end of his life, silenced an otherwise noisy audience.
As Cash sang “Everyone I know goes away in the end… I will make you hurt…You can have it all, my empire of dirt”, if you squinted at the stage, then it just might have been Johnny Cash up there at that moment, alone, singing to you. That almost sublime moment is about the best you can ask of a tribute act.
On most of the songs Clive John/Johnny Cash was accompanied by his own Tennessee Three as well as a keyboardist who doubled on trumpet (a necessary component of “Ring of Fire”) and intermittently by Megan Thomas, who ably channelled the voice and mischief of June Carter on duets such as “Jackson” and (the Carter-penned) “Time’s a-Wasting” which features in the Hollywood biopic, Walk The Line.
During the latter of these numbers, the projections of Cash and Carter were replaced on the backdrop by images of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon so that, in effect, we had John and Thomas portraying Phoenix and Witherspoon portraying Cash and Carter.
While the performers managed to pull off quite a show on the night, tribute acts can be quite a gamble. There are, of course, die-hard fans who will be satisfied with any nod to their musical heroes, but there are not enough of them to fill a decent-sized venue.
Thus the Fairfield Halls has to rely on a more discerning general audience who will expect something more than just a pale copy of the original. Nearly five years since the Halls re-opened after a costly and still controversial £70million refurbishment, the problem with the Fairfield Halls’ artistic programme is that it relies too much on tribute acts of variable quality.
With the Johnny Cash Roadshow, they got lucky, but the more-than-half-empty Ashcroft on Tuesday night was testament to a broader lack of faith in tribute acts. It can’t be a good business model. And this is a business, remember, which through our council, is owned by the people of Croydon.
Perhaps it is time the Fairfield Halls got a little more creative. After last month’s Eric and the Claptones (geddit?), a glance at the “What’s On” section of the web page reveals a meagre popular music programme heavily reliant on a steady stream of tribute acts:
- February 2: The Magic of the Bee Gees
- February 9: Lost in music (70s disco tribute)
- March 9: A Country Night in Nashville
- March 16: Frankie Valli tribute
- April 19: Lipstick on Your Collar (The 50s and 60s show!).
There is a place for tribute acts (not the Ashcroft, though, it is too big), but it would be good to see some original artists, the sort that can pack out a medium-sized venue that sits round the corner from a railway station that can deliver an audience drawn from all over the south-east.
Crowd pleaser: “Ring of Fire” was a stomping, audience-on-their-feet finale in the half-full Ashcroft
It wasn’t always like this. As Clive John himself explained, Johnny Cash had played the Fairfield Halls on November 8, 1991.
If Johnny Cash’s spirit was evoked during the performance, the venue itself looked a ghost of its former glory.
We deserve more than this. Or was the slogan on the council’s gnomic Borough of Culture posters – This is Croydon! – really a threat, and not a promise?
Read previous arts reviews by Ken Towl:
- A night at the comic opera: from sublime to the ridiculous
- It’s time to put back the Sparks into Croydon’s Fairfield Halls
- £1.5m being spent on our Borough of not-very-much Culture
- Recognition at last: Coleridge-Taylor gets placed centre stage
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It was a really enjoyable evening although barely half full. BHL bar staff were great and the sound and lights guys were excellent.
Average audience age was probably 65+ which suggests us Johnny Cash fans are a dying breed.
I agree that the listings at the Fairfield Halls is pretty dire with the number of tribute acts on but realistically most bands don’t want to play to a seated audience.
When they rennovated the place, why didn’t they just keep the concert hall as the seated venue and turn the Ashcroft Theatre into a proper gig venue similar to something like the Shepherd’s Bush Empire tha’s primarily a standing venue
They built a non-seated performance area – at the expense of the Halls’ Arnhem Gallery, so we have an arts centre with no art gallery. The Wreck, as we call it, stands by, barely ever used.