David McAlmont presents 'Billie Holiday At Carnegie Hall'
David McAlmont’s extraordinary voice first came to public attention back in the mid-nineties when, at the height of Britpop, his collaboration with Suede’s Bernard Butler became a minor hit. Over the intervening years he has received such extravagant praise - Taylor Parkes once suggested that "one day he will open his mouth and a cathedral will fall out" - that I confess I approached this concert with the degree of scepticism. Like a cross-armed grump at the Glasgow Empire waiting for the supporting comedian, I prepared to the underwhelmed.
As is the way with these things, his unassuming band had already shuffled on before the chattering audience noticed, and were initially offered only muted applause. Sue Richardson quickly grabbed the full attention of the assembled, however, with her scorching trumpet introduction to The Lady Sings the Blues, laying the foundations for McAlmont’s entrance, who, without uttering a word, diverted all eyes to his arresting appearance. In contrast to the band - all soberly dressed in black - McAlmont was head to toe in white (an allusion, surely, to Holiday’s signature gardenia) and heavily bejewelled. Lithe, bald-headed, bewhiskered, and confounding his fifty something years, he stretched his arms messianically, as if to gather in the audience, before opening his mouth to sing.
Immediately, all thoughts of appearance were left the mind, to be replaced by wonder at the noise coming out of this mouth. Not only was he very probably the finest singing voice I’ve ever heard, he was also spookily, unnervingly like Holiday. Not, I hasten to add, that this was some sort of grotesque tribute mimicry. His voice is high for a man but it is a resolutely male voice, yet, in his tone, his inflection, and even in the way he tilts back his head to sing, he somehow managed to embody the woman he so clearly idolises. It was as if he was somehow channelled her spirit. Any thoughts that he might simply sound a lot like her should be quickly set aside. This is a man that also performs tributes to Dusty Springfield and Shirley Bassey (and doesn’t that sound interesting?) so something altogether more artful and constructed was going on here.
I hesitate to highlight specific songs – this was, after all, Billie Holiday at the top of her game – but the heart breaking intensity of Don’t Explain and My Man do stick in the mind, not least because McAlmont’s distinctive presentation showcased just how good a lyricist she was. The only misfire (springing, ironically, from McAlmont’s generosity as a performer) were the interminable solos that torpedoing Fine and Mellow – a song that should have providing a welcome bluesier contrast but ended up feeling just a little too jazz club. And the absence of Strange Fruit was a surprise. Presumably it was too edgy for the Carnegie Hall in the fifties, and therefore, by the rules he had set himself, was absent from the Playhouse, but it was a shame nonetheless.
Deciding to run through the set list of a particular concert at a particular venue seems such a peculiarly specific thing to do, that fans alone will truly understand why he would (for the record, it was a famously brilliant, and arguably never bettered night) but then again, it was obviously to those fans he was performing. Regularly taking time out to read excerpts from her biography, his admiration for the singer was obvious - his exposition of her troubled life both moving and illuminating. He also, for reasons less obvious, gave over considerable time to ruminating about his own experiences. He wasn’t about to share any explicit parallels, but it’s easy to imagine what they might be. The resonance of a black man performing to a predominantly white, middle-class, middle-aged audience did, at least for me, hang in the air.
The performance overran by twenty minutes, but no one, including McAlmont, seemed in any hurry to leave, finding time to encore with a haunting version of God Bless the child, accompanied only by Alex Webb on the piano. Afterwards, outside the Playhouse, while trying to work out which way to go for the festival’s opening ceremony, I found myself standing next to a similarly distracted fellow wearing an unprepossessing green woolly jumper and a baseball bat. To my surprise my companion approached this unassuming man and told him that he had made her cry. Only then did the penny drop that this was David McAlmont in his civvies - almost unrecognisably different from his charismatic on stage persona - briefly appearing to us in human form.
He thanked her courteously, before melting into the crowd. I like to think that the spirit of Billie Holiday went with him.
