Music / Reviews
Review: Ann Liu Cannon, Rough Trade – ‘Fury bubbles beneath beauty’
There’s a brilliant book out at the moment, about Bristol’s Folk scene in the 60s.
Ian A Anderson’s Alien Water conjures Clifton’s Troubadour Club beautifully: it makes you long for time travel, to jump into a world of dark corners, of spilled coffee, of glorious singer-songwriters.
You feel that Marlborough’s Ann Liu Cannon would fit right in.
This early evening set at Rough Trade may not, quite, have the ramshackle, two-storey atmosphere of the Troubadour but it’s wonderfully sweet and wholesome. With people gathered around tables in the bar, cold drinks are sipped on a hot day as Cannon exudes a radiance.
Here to promote her debut album, Clever Rabbits, Cannon is equal parts early PJ Harvey, 60s protest singer and siren-voiced folkie. She strums and soars, her voice arcing over the record racks.
No You Don’t, taken from that debut, is etched with anger and pain but it’s undercut with the sweetest of pop moments. There’s a hint of the Beatles’ Blackbird, there’s the echo of a classic Hollywood weepy – it’s as though someone’s left a Golden Age film on in the other room. It’s a cloud with a silver lining. Her voice is high and honeyed.
There’s more of a snarl to My Boy, more of an edge. If Cannon is, largely, wholesome then it is here that she allows the lust to creep in.
She has too much control over her voice to allow for total abandon but she prowls like Superstition-era Siouxsie, whips at her words like Dry-era Polly Harvey. When she hits the highest of high notes, no one is left to wonder what effect she might have on that boy.
On an insanely hot evening, At Least it’s Warm seems a ridiculous statement but Cannon is taking aim at Apple and their climate-destroying ilk, not making some dull observation about the weather.
It’s another song where fury bubbles beneath beauty. It’s tumbling acoustic Pop, just as lovely as Linda Thompson or Joan Baez at their best.
Clever Rabbits, too, has a softly 60s-psych-folk haze around which clever words wrap themselves.
The unbelievably tender Papa’s Gone to the Clear Sky is a fitting tribute to her father while Sinking Foxes harks back, once again, to those unlicensed Folk Club days.
It’s a song about (not) drinking in Camden Town and is an anthem for the corner-dwellers, the wallflowers and the tee-total. Cannon gives a gorgeous voice to those that need it the most.
The days of the Troubadour might be long gone but Ann Liu Cannon helps to keep its spirit alive.
Main image: Gavin McNamara
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