Iron & Wine, Roundhouse

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Beards, beards, beards: at the Roundhouse, they seemed to be everywhere, sprouting from the chins of hundreds of chaps in the audience. Perhaps, though, I was just looking out for them, what with the luxuriant growth on the face of the man they had all come to see: Iron & Wine, the artist otherwise known as Sam Beam, singer, songwriter and former film studies professor from the American south-east.

Indeed, I think I had beards on the brain; skimming through his Wikipedia biography before the show, I thought I’d read that he “sometimes tours with a full beard”, when of course it says “band”, not “beard”. On this, the London leg of his UK tour, he was indeed touring with a full band, and it made for an evening that was always absorbing, sometimes engrossing, but never quite compelling. I suspect that the reasons were manifold.

First, as Beam himself said at the outset, he had a heavy cold, which I can’t say had a significant impact on his voice, but it seemed to dampen his ardour somewhat. Also, the sound quality was a bit odd; from my vantage point in the balcony it never quite gelled into something warm and whole, never became more than the sum of its parts. And perhaps, too, the night just didn’t have the right chemistry, the spark that’s essential for a really memorable gig.

Beam himself was an affable host, wiffling on about this and that, checking us out regularly to make sure that we were OK, like a nurse with a thermometer; it was all very sweet and friendly. As for the music, Beam’s oeuvre is increasingly unpindownable. There was acoustic folky stuff in there, for sure, which is how he started out almost a decade ago, but there were also funk grooves, and jazz, and African rhythms. At times he reminded me of John Martyn, with his music’s fluidity and sense of space. “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog)” was all swirly and psychedelic, embellished by an electrified banjo, the lyrics typically oblique and metaphorical; “Me and Lazarus”, from his new Kiss Each Other Clean album, was jazzier, was full of detail in the patter of the percussion and the burbling of the clarinet. “Walking Far From Home” meanwhile, another new song, was stronger, harder, more focused.

All the while, Beam and his band played with an air of studied concentration. Clustered around the stage, they seemed intent on one another, when perhaps some outreach work would have helped. I’m not suggesting that they should have led the crowd in a round of “All the people on the left say ‘Yeaah’”, but their body language suggested that they were playing as much for themselves as for the audience beyond.

At times, though, they came out of their shells: “House by the Sea” was a slice of pure West African high life, played with joy and greeted with a big cheer from the crowd. As was “Naked As We Came”, an old favourite, and a song that harks back to Beam’s simpler, folkier past, delivered in his strange but beguiling voice, husky yet high-pitched.

Music at its best gives me a reaction that’s physical – tingling, prickling, palpitating; here, I have to say that none of those things happened. This was my first time with Iron & Wine, and although it was a satisfying night of complex but listenable music, I have a hunch that I’d have liked him better in his early days when it was just him, his guitar, his voice and his songs. And of course his beard.