Jeremy Warmsley

Sometimes, the smallest budget inspires, nigh on causes, the most inventive projects (you all remember the Unicorn's 'Jellybones' video). In the same vein, the simplest arrangements can harbour the most interest: evaporating away the excess leaves the purest crystals. Tonight, entertainment arrives in Bristol courtesy of tight budgets, limited equipment and minimalist set-up. Francois opens with stop-frame animated film, ‘Get Good’, joined by chanteuse Rozi Plain, the small wiry-framed pair crouch on the stage floor, hunching over miniature keyboards, providing live orchestration for a modern silent film. Animation gives life to message-bearing playing cards, twisting pictures, photocopied faces and chalky rainbows. The message is of encouragement, to make something, to take on a dare. There’s a technicolour fantasy mood, childish dreams, a reminder of ‘Tales of the Riverbank’ where cutesy rodents are busy caring for their dolls-house home and surrounding river. After this, Francois and Rozi climb to their feet as friends take to the stage and a group of eight dance a ring-of-roses to lo-fi party songs, embellished with group whooping and recorder squeals. Not all the right notes are hit or sung, tunes aren’t necessarily all that adventurous, but this is no spoiler when there looks to be such a happy shindig taking place on stage.

Rose Kemp doesn’t look to be having fun: she looks at turns annoyed, worried, about to break down into tears. Her music is the same, her voice is multi-tonal, switching from PJ Harvey howl to a barely voiced whisper. When playing with guitar she is moody grunge girl, switching guitar effects pedals, hiding behind her hair. All the guitar noise only hides her fragile vocal moments, like hiding personality behind hair dye - when her voice stands alone, vocals looped over and over, the expression and spirit is no longer masked. Dark and brooding atmosphere starts to become suffocating; equipment breaks down and Rose seems to be on the verge of doing so too. It’s hard to separate personality from stage-persona; whether things are really not right or whether this is all part of an act. Dispensing of guitar and microphone and storming off stage she sings completely alone. Rose is no straightforward proposition, she plays out contradictions: the final sight is of a girl, rocking gently back and forth, completely introverted yet filling a packed room with lone echoing voice.

Tonight, although his is the name up in lights, Jeremy Warmsley is the foreigner in the room, the only one to hail from the city of smoke. He is the only one without closest supporters fawning from the aisles, and so, he takes on the role of the travelling minstrel; bringing his plush, sumptuous songs to audiences new, towns provincial. Where the single version of ‘Dirty Blue Jeans’ seems baroque in it’s thick orchestration and velvet-pile strings, tonight the accompaniment is romantic piano, curtain swathes of sweeping runs and Chopin moments. Taking away the layers of additional sound has interesting effects – songs have to stand on their own two legs, and this they do, sparser sound reminding us how these ballads are infinitely interesting: memorable, meandering, melodic. Ballads is an appropriate term, as Sir Warmsley is a storyteller of high calibre, ‘5 Verses’ is the chronological account of a relationship sprouting out of a karaoke bar, ‘Modern Children’ frets over the new youth not knowing “right from wrong”. It’s the ability to fit rambling tales around his melodies that sets Warmsley apart from the evening’s earlier acts; a combination of wry humour and remarkable invention.