Beth Jeans Houghton
House Concert, York
30 October 2009
If she’d got her skates on, Beth Jeans Houghton would have been on all the 2009 ‘Ones To Watch’ lists. She trades in exactly the same kind of winsome folk-pop as Laura Marling/Polly Scattergood/any other oddly-named teenager beloved of the nation’s tastemakers. In fact, she’s probably just in time for the 2010 lists.
But by the looks of things, Houghton doesn’t do skates. She does ten inch stilettos. And she steps into those stilettos wearing a pair of skeleton print leggings (it is Hallowe’en after all). And to set off the skeleton print she wears a floral dress, or what was a dress before it was hand-stitched to make a hot pant suit to protect her modesty. And atop her crop of bleached blonde hair is a huge pink bow. For a visual representation of the word ‘kooky’, this is as good as you’re gonna get.
Thus begins this most unusual of gig experiences. We’re crammed, around 50 or so of us, into someone’s front room in a quiet village outside York, watching possibly the next big thing tottering round on a pair of high heels, complaining of cramp and asking her Edwardian-styled violin player to crank up the reverb. It’s an extraordinary way to see a band, and highly recommended, if you’re lucky enough to ever get a ticket (see www.houseconcertsyork.co.uk for future gigs)
In between her lapses in concentration and giggly asides, Ms Houghton delivers a set of earnest acoustic ditties, straightforward enough to ensure maximum radio-friendliness, but edgy enough to keep you listening. The lyrics in particular show depth beyond the ‘I txtd u, but u didn’t msg me back’ banalities of some of her contemporaries.
There’s one about the lady who is memorialised on a bench Beth and her ex-boyfriend used to sit on. There’s one about a guy who sweats profusely at night. There’s one where you presume she just found a title she liked – Dodecahedron - and built a song around it, otherwise goodness knows what’s going in her head. It’s all perfectly entertaining, and as usual at these house gigs, no-one wants her to leave. One wag, referring to her anecdote about the strange locals she met at a gig in Ipswich, warns her as she’s about to introduce her last song, ‘You’re in our village now!’. It might not be the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall, but everyone leaves feeling they’ve seen someone about to break big.
If the world had a vacancy for ‘kooky chick with folky songs’ (and let’s face it, there’s no shortage of applicants) then it could definitely do worse than give it to Beth Jeans Houghton.