Bleak beauty
Having enjoyed Simone (silent e) Felice’s work with his younger siblings - appropriately recorded as The Felice Brothers - and his acclaimed albums with folk-soul outfit, The Duke & The King, Clash are eager to see his self-titled solo debut performed live. We aren’t, however, expecting a thigh-slapping, foot-stomping affair.
As Felice and his four-piece take the stage the audience make themselves heard. There is a definite no-nonsense, if not leery, edge to the welcome. The band look great - a right hodge-podge. The ladies take drums and violin; the gents take keys and guitar, played on the lap for slide. Despite looking sinewy, strong and sturdy, Felice has an immediate air of fragility to him.
He takes a stool at centre stage and after acknowledging the audience with a shy smile launches into ‘New York Times’. Each song is prefaced by Felice with a brief explanation of where it came from and why he wrote it. Dedicating the second song to his baby daughter, Felice confides, “My daughter Pearl saved my life, she’s my Joan of Arc, my guardian angel… She’s, she’s a, she’s a…
“Pearl” comes the deadpan nugget from a gruff manc accent.
A smile flashes and Felice shouts “hit it mutherfucker!” Prince style and they launch into ‘You and I Belong’, a hand-clapping, fingerpicking, ivory thumping thing of beauty.
It’s a rare moment of simple joy as the bulk of these songs are mournful and haunting tales of lost souls.
As he explains the genesis of each track before playing it, those unaware of Felice’s backstory get a rough-hewn and generally bleak picture conjured up. Formative years spent in the Catskill Mountains up-state New York are populated by a series of dispossessed and tragic characters with seriously shit luck. Death lingers malignantly and we learn of Felice’s own scrapes with the grim reaper. He was pronounced clinically dead at twelve years old after a brain aneurysm, and he knocked on death’s door once more in the summer of 2010 when he was forced to undergo open-heart surgery after a childhood congenital defect threatened an unjustly early exit.
His survival has imbued him with love, gratitude and retrospection, and now openhearted is a fitting way to describe the songs he writes and the way he sings them.
As Felice resurrects the ghosts of his past it’s strikingly apparent just how much he is investing of himself in doing this. In ‘Dawn Brady’s Son’ we get images of his childhood friends’ dad “dancing all wrong” after hanging himself upon returning from Vietnam. And we learn of how the friend used to climb into his window at night while his mum was forced to be a “loose woman” in order to get them by.
The silence from the audience is intense, just shifting the weight on your feet causes a floorboard creek and an immediate sense of violating the reverent hush.
The crowd have been utterly absorbed throughout, disarmed by this raw honesty and empathy. He closes the set with ‘Radio Song’ revealing that his family surrounded his bedside and sang it to him while he was at the brink of death. Its joyous chorus chant of “please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die - you moved me all of my life, all of my life, all my life” was a rousing way to end. After heartfelt thanks they leave the stage to rapturous applause, but there’s no way they can get away without coming back to bestow a few more songs on this crowd.
Felice returns alone and takes the stool once more to pull off a stunning cover of the Pink Floyd classic ‘Wish You Were Here’. He continues with ‘One More American Song’, and it is truly epic balladry - as deserving of a place in that canon of untouchable, timeless songs as the previous one, and the one that follows it. As the band rejoin him, Felice introduces the final song of the night by saying he doesn’t usually cover Dylan, and that he “didn’t truly appreciate these lyrics until I found myself half way down Jacob’s ladder… or maybe that should be up,” and asks us all to join in. Now, a bunch of Mancs and Salfordians singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ has the potential to be either spine-crackingly cringeworthy or a well spirited piss-take. It transpires to be neither. Felice has long since endeared himself to all present and there isn’t a person in the house who isn’t unashamedly singing back to the man who’s just spent the last 90 minutes laying bare his soul.
Words and photo by Nick Rice
Click here for a photo gallery of the gig.
As Felice and his four-piece take the stage the audience make themselves heard. There is a definite no-nonsense, if not leery, edge to the welcome. The band look great - a right hodge-podge. The ladies take drums and violin; the gents take keys and guitar, played on the lap for slide. Despite looking sinewy, strong and sturdy, Felice has an immediate air of fragility to him.
He takes a stool at centre stage and after acknowledging the audience with a shy smile launches into ‘New York Times’. Each song is prefaced by Felice with a brief explanation of where it came from and why he wrote it. Dedicating the second song to his baby daughter, Felice confides, “My daughter Pearl saved my life, she’s my Joan of Arc, my guardian angel… She’s, she’s a, she’s a…
“Pearl” comes the deadpan nugget from a gruff manc accent.
A smile flashes and Felice shouts “hit it mutherfucker!” Prince style and they launch into ‘You and I Belong’, a hand-clapping, fingerpicking, ivory thumping thing of beauty.
It’s a rare moment of simple joy as the bulk of these songs are mournful and haunting tales of lost souls.
As he explains the genesis of each track before playing it, those unaware of Felice’s backstory get a rough-hewn and generally bleak picture conjured up. Formative years spent in the Catskill Mountains up-state New York are populated by a series of dispossessed and tragic characters with seriously shit luck. Death lingers malignantly and we learn of Felice’s own scrapes with the grim reaper. He was pronounced clinically dead at twelve years old after a brain aneurysm, and he knocked on death’s door once more in the summer of 2010 when he was forced to undergo open-heart surgery after a childhood congenital defect threatened an unjustly early exit.
His survival has imbued him with love, gratitude and retrospection, and now openhearted is a fitting way to describe the songs he writes and the way he sings them.
As Felice resurrects the ghosts of his past it’s strikingly apparent just how much he is investing of himself in doing this. In ‘Dawn Brady’s Son’ we get images of his childhood friends’ dad “dancing all wrong” after hanging himself upon returning from Vietnam. And we learn of how the friend used to climb into his window at night while his mum was forced to be a “loose woman” in order to get them by.
The silence from the audience is intense, just shifting the weight on your feet causes a floorboard creek and an immediate sense of violating the reverent hush.
The crowd have been utterly absorbed throughout, disarmed by this raw honesty and empathy. He closes the set with ‘Radio Song’ revealing that his family surrounded his bedside and sang it to him while he was at the brink of death. Its joyous chorus chant of “please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die - you moved me all of my life, all of my life, all my life” was a rousing way to end. After heartfelt thanks they leave the stage to rapturous applause, but there’s no way they can get away without coming back to bestow a few more songs on this crowd.
Felice returns alone and takes the stool once more to pull off a stunning cover of the Pink Floyd classic ‘Wish You Were Here’. He continues with ‘One More American Song’, and it is truly epic balladry - as deserving of a place in that canon of untouchable, timeless songs as the previous one, and the one that follows it. As the band rejoin him, Felice introduces the final song of the night by saying he doesn’t usually cover Dylan, and that he “didn’t truly appreciate these lyrics until I found myself half way down Jacob’s ladder… or maybe that should be up,” and asks us all to join in. Now, a bunch of Mancs and Salfordians singing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ has the potential to be either spine-crackingly cringeworthy or a well spirited piss-take. It transpires to be neither. Felice has long since endeared himself to all present and there isn’t a person in the house who isn’t unashamedly singing back to the man who’s just spent the last 90 minutes laying bare his soul.
Words and photo by Nick Rice
Click here for a photo gallery of the gig.
