Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can, as the great mountain of discarded troubadours proves. Yet the size of that rejects mountain also tells us how alluring the prospect of baring one’s feelings to strangers can be.
Zach Condon, who works as Beirut, and Dove Ellis are at different points on the sensitive young man spectrum. Condon is 39 for a start, so the young bit doesn’t even hold true. He was part of a wave of a particular sort of sensitive young men in the first decade of the century – ones who looked outside the US rock and folk tradition, to history and geography, and who used unconventional instrumentation to bring their songs to life.
Alongside Condon in those years were the likes of Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, singing about old sailing ships and Spanish infantas, and Sufjan Stevens making elaborate baroque folk albums about American states. It was like a librarian’s convention exploding into a rave, and all owed a very particular debt to the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel – ground zero for this sort of thing.
Condon’s was a very particular sound, woozy with horns, redolent of some mythical and non-specific place somewhere south and east of Vienna, and it’s still more or less what he and his band do. The titles of the songs were signifiers every bit as much as the music itself – ‘Gallipoli’, ‘Postcards From Italy’, ‘Tuanaki Atoll’, ‘Nantes’, ‘Caspian Tiger’, ‘Villa Saccehtti’, ‘Serbian Cocek’. It was a musical InterRail trip that never left south London.
Condon has a lovely, louche voice, though he likes to glide over the syllables so melodiously that it was hard to make out the actual lyrics. One instead sank into the sound, into its lushness and rustiness. But his show highlighted one perpetual dilemma: when you emerge fully formed, as Condon has done, where do you go? I’m not sure he knows the answer.
Up Brixton Hill a few nights later, at the little pub that is the single best place to see young talent, Dove Ellis knocked me sideways. He’s a young Irish singer who brings to mind some illustrious forebears: Van Morrison, when he still made records you liked; Buckleys both Tim and Jeff. His voice is extraordinary – leaping into falsetto, moving effortlessly across the scale – as are some of the songs (there are a few on Bandcamp; he’s not yet been signed, but he will be soon, barring disaster).
He opened his set alone playing a Telecaster, but was joined by two others: one on drums and bits of synth, and one switching between bass and (I think) soprano sax. They had at times the satisfying crunch of a power trio, but also a dreaminess and gauziness and a sense that they were journeying somewhere and not fixated on a destination. Crucially, it was very easy to imagine the songs scaled up and coloured in, which at some point will need to happen when a big band on a big stage takes over and all the details that were only hinted at in the Windmill become apparent.
Don’t be in the least surprised when in four years’ time Dove Ellis is doing multiple nights at the Albert Hall
It was not a long set – maybe half an hour, sandwiched between two other bands – but it was startling and wholly persuasive. Ellis himself didn’t seem to have any of the nerves or excitement of most young singers: he played his songs calmly and coolly, as if he knew better things await.
It may be a little late in the year for Ellis to be on next year’s best-newcomer lists, but don’t be surprised if he does make them. And don’t be in the least surprised when in four years’ time he’s doing multiple nights at the Albert Hall with a crack band of great musicians: even on a pub stage there was a scope and ambition to his music that was looking far beyond the back walls of this pub to much bigger stages.
I’m reluctant to make predictions – the first piece I wrote as a student journalist insisted there would be great things ahead for Tad, but that Nirvana were going nowhere – but I assure you Dove Ellis is an extraordinary talent. Check him out at the 100 Club next week or Manchester the week after.
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