Once in a while, rock’n’roll isn’t where you’ve been, but where you’re going. In a world where just standing still is an accomplishment, tonight sees a band soaring.
And sure, somebody might’ve guessed that one day Jeff Tweedy – Jay Farrar’s amiable Uncle Tupelo sidekick and later the blurry-voiced troubadour of Wilco’s unpretentious bar-band debut “A.M.” – would stand on a London stage confidently conducting a head-spinningly dazzling celebration of the far boundaries of sound. But they’d have been significantly more psychic than the bloke who heard Radiohead’s “Pablo Honey” and forecast “Hail To The Thief”.
Like a sum-greater-than-parts fusion of Chicago’s twin musical tendencies, Tweedy’s latest incarnation of Wilco marries keyboard-heavy post-rock adventures (minus the higher maths) and scuffed Midwestern twangery (minus the tenth-hand fatigue). And comes up with something both awe-inspiringly epic and warmly homespun. From the radio-wave shifts and joyous piano of “Poor Places”, the sleepily tender “Less Than You Think”, the bassy and ambling “Hell Is Chrome” and a heavy-bottomed purr through a harmony-laden “Handshake Drugs”, Jeff and his six nerdily intent-looking cohorts motor boldly tonight into a radical middle age where what can be imagined and played feels infinite.
It’s all there: gleeful tempo-shift sonic explosions (“Muzzle Of Bees”); w*nk-free sci-fi weirdness (“A Shot In The Arm”); precise, steely rollicking (“I’m The Man Who Loves You”); hypnotic rock-outs (“Spiders”, accompanied by the forgiveably awful sight of hefty fortysomething fanboys punching the air); delirious Beatles/Brian Wilson popfulness (“Hummingbird”). And, of course, those devastatingly off-hand lines of his, those heartache whispers and dreamy endearments in a gentle, soulful “Jesus, Etc”, a velvety “Reservations” and “She’s A Jar”’s hymn to that “pop quiz kid, sleepy kisser”.
And if Jeff’s feeling the strain of these rarefied altitudes, you can’t tell. We get jokes about a long-ago strop at Shepherd’s Bush; a mischievous, Dubya-baiting cover of Randy Newman’s “Political Science”; a bluesy “Kingpin” from “Being There” prefaced with “don’t get too excited; it’s the one from that album no one likes”; a paean to tobacco in an organ-buzzing “Misunderstood”; sidelong confessions about “feeling all rock’n’roll and shit” illustrated by a sweet, teenage-goofy “Heavy Metal Drummer”.
A triumphal night, it could easily merit a matching strut from the Midwest boy made more than good. Instead, he ends with heart-on-sleeve nods to the underdog that speak volumes about why even his epic moments radiate human warmth. Like many of his best moments, the shuffling, Replacements-esque “The Late Greats” is a love song to rock itself, a valediction for “the greatest lost track of all time” by “the best band [who] will never get signed” and a singer “who just looks a little too old”.
And then, a heartfelt object lesson in the same: Tweedy picks his way delicately through the benedictory “Be Not So Nervous” by lost-to-time English folksinger Bill Fay. Jeff tells Fay – a white-haired, kind-faced man blinking awkwardly from the stalls – “you have no idea how much your music means to us”. We know how he feels.
