How Many More Days Can We Take In The Hope Of Seeing You?

Belated happy birthdays to Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man aka Paul Webb. 

 

Beth celebrated her 59th on 4th January, Paul his 62nd on 16th January. Both were key players in seminal albums by Portishead and Talk Talk respectively, but when they collaborated on the 2003 album Out Of Season...bloody hell, it was magic. Sends a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.

 

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see them live in concert but TooYube has come to the rescue again, courtesy of the mighty Mike Armstrong, who has generously shared this gig from the Paléo Festival in Nyon, Switzerland on Saturday 26th July 2003.

 

Prepare to shed some tears at the sheer beauty of it all.

 

0:00:00 Mysteries

0:04:39 Romance

0:10:20 Drake

0:15:02 Resolve

0:18:40 Spider Monkey

0:24:22 Tom The Model

0:29:09 Sand River (Autumn Leaves)

0:34:24 Funny Time Of Year

0:45:15 Candy Says (Cover of The Velvet Underground)

0:50:36 Show

 

[bonus tracks]

0:59:31 Tom The Model (Later...With Jools Holland, 2nd October 2002) 

1:03:19 Mysteries (Later...With Jools Holland, 2nd October 2002)

Paul has released two further albums as Rustin Man, Drift Code (2019) and Clockdust (2020), both available via his website.

Beth returned with Krzysztof Penderecki and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2019. Their collaboration was a singular reading of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 (Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs) Op. 36, again available via her website.

 

The impact of both on music and its possibilities is hugely, hugely underrated. I'll be coming back to both of them during 2024, I promise.

 

And Out Of Season wasn't the first time they'd worked together either: Beth appeared on the song Jalap in 1997. It was a track from Fields And Waves, the second album by .O.Rang aka Lee Harris and Paul Webb. Now .O.Rang is deserving of a post all by themselves....