Vic Chesnutt, Kings Arms Tavern, 4 July 2009

Whilst working at Virgin Digital many years ago, my colleague Mark passed me an unmarked CD, and said 'play this - it's going to be massive'. The track started with a donk-donk-donk-donk that would become terribly familiar over the coming year as Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy', a track which I still rather like despite having heard it over a gazillion times. It's a bit bittersweet actually, as I remember the conversation with our PR company the day after the track was released. Being the first digital-only single to be chart elegible (I think... something like that anyway) they were keen to make a big song and dance over our day one sales. Asked for the number, I said 'Thirty-two'. '32 thousand? Brilliant news, I'll get the release out'. 'No mate. Thirty-two.'

How depressing. The track went on to deliver about 31,000 digital sales in the UK that week, of which we did, um, about fifty.

Anyway, moving to the nub of this post, earlier this year, one half of Gnarls (Dangermouse) hooked up with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and David Lynch, on a project known as 'Dark Night of the Soul'. This was to be a bit of a masterpiece, with a 100-page booklet featuring Lynch's photography, numerous guest spots and Dangermouse's trademark unorthodox, brilliant production.

One dispute with the record label later, and the album was put out, minus the actual audio content. Contained within the box was a blank CD, with a bit of text exhorting the user to 'use the CD as they saw fit'. The subtext here, naturally, was that they'd leaked the content online and an enterprising fan could easily find it. I may have done. And it's a great album.

The final two tracks feature one Vic Chesnutt, about whom you can read more here, but suffice it to say that he's seen as a bit of a legend in some parts. As a songwriter he's intelligent, emotive and darkly humourous, as a performer that gallows humour comes across even more strongly. So when I noticed he was touring New Zealand and playing in Auckland this weekend I grabbed a pair of tickets.

So into the largely empty venue we walked at about quarter to nine. We got drinks, settled against a wall at the back (no seats in this place). A few more punters filtered in as the support cranked his way through a few fairly hackneyed tracks. A couple of people came in towards the end of his set - one in a wheelchair (Chesnutt is paraplegic, easy to spot...), one a short, older lady who looked a bit confused, wearing trademark 'crazy lady' clothes. She wandered around for a bit, conspicuous in the nearly-empty venue, and then got up on the stage. And picked up a guitar. And began some stretches.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Victoria Williams. A bit of a legend in her own right, apparently, and it's fair to say that for portions of her performance I was completely transfixed, and there was a definite musical brilliance going on there throughout. Shambolic, unselfconscious, at times fascinating, but her habit of stopping songs part-way through because she'd forgotten the rest, or constantly detuning and retuning, slipping the beat every few bars and forcing Vic (on drums) to stop and restart, got a bit much. 90 minutes of this though was a challenge, one which as it happens was too much for the Kiwi - she went home.

I'm still in two minds about this. I'd never heard of her prior to this gig, and I'm still not sure whether this was amazing or awful. I suspect it's a perfect mix of both. On the occasions where she found a bit of form and let rip, she was amazing. The initial shambling ineptitude was charming, but rapidly got tiresome.

After all this, Vic (with whom she's been friends for over 20 years, apparently) did his thing, getting an unbelievable sound out of his battered acoustic. He did play one of the Dangermouse tracks (Grim Augury, which stripped of its electronica was startlingly raw and bleak), and for the majority of the show played older stuff and audience requests. In such an intimate venue (which had filled a bit by now), his style came across fantastically; personal, human and warm whilst at the same time searingly emotional.

What really threw all this into perspective for me though was the car ride home. After nearly three hours of emotionally intelligent, personal, richly descriptive music performed in a variety of unique ways, the noise that vomited out of the car radio was just too much and had to be turned off. Overproduced, sterile, facile and sickeningly meaningless. Some genres make a virtue of this and that I applaud, but when it's glossy synthetics masquerading as indie pop I just can't take it.

So on reflection, I'm really glad I went. Challenging, yes. But so very, very good. Don't know if I could do it every week though. Fortunately in Auckland that's not much of a likelihood.