Right from the start let me say that this was a fantastic gig. On a rainy Tuesday night in North London, Ray Raposa and the rest of his band brought West Coast alternative to life. Alternative is hard to define, somewhere between garage rock and experimental country music, but that no way does justice to the delicacy of sound over which drawly affecting lyrics are draped like the vines on the CD artwork. It has moments of orchestral layering, some where it should be the backdrop to a good day on a Pacific beach, yet others where the quiet gave way to insistent emotional pursuit by way of rhythm. Ray gazed intently out from under a resolutely fixed baseball cap. As things progressed, the sweat dripped and things got intense. Ray took off his shirt and his hat.

Until recently I was a total newcomer to the world of Ray Raposo, the man who is the constant factor in Castanets. I got their latest CD to review - "Texas Rose, The Thaw And The Beasts." I was blown out of the water by the record, the subverted and cracked nature of it all - I'm stealing some of Ray's own words there and I'm sure he won't mind.

Texas Rose remains right up there as one of my top albums of the year. Despite being written up as the most accessible album, this remains sufficiently challenging that I don't think Ray's ever going to be playing the Ryman Auditorium, and I kind of think that's how he wants it. So I went to Highbury with hope in my heart, and it was justified.

They'd been on tour in Europe for weeks by this stage, finishing off a week in the UK with a night in London then one night in Belgium before the big silver bird takes them home. Did I say home? California for Ray, the Pacific North West for others in the band. They only have a couple of weeks before they take it over to Australia.

That rock'n'roll lifestyle eh?



So, back to Tuesday night in Highbury. Believing for some reason that the Texas Rose album was almost a Ray-solo affair, when they eventually made it up on to the small stage in the upstairs hall of the Garage, I was surprised when more and more people kept strapping on guitars. Eventually five of them crammed themselves up there. Or not, as the case may be. The stage being about the size of my bed, two of them took it in turns to stand on the floor at the side. It was largely different musicians than recorded the Texas Rose album, circumstances during the recording being that not everyone could get to the the right place to join in. They were mighty fine.

It was a touching sign of democracy that Mr Raposa positioned himself off to stage right, eschewing any star delusional posturings.
There were some technical problems but for me they didn't detract. We were told from the stage that the equipment had been failing now for some while at this back end of the tour. Thankfully it was all rental gear that had been breaking down. Ray told me later that he was really looking forward to just dumping it all back on the rental company. It's got to be no joke whatsoever to get it all set up in sound check then experience it all going to rats half way through the set. Tonight there was rewiring happening on the fly but, well, they're pros and just got on. In some way, as much as I felt for their difficulties, it also brought us closer, musicians and watchers united in giving some leeway, and some sort of shared adversity.

The set was based largely around that brilliant new album. I'm sure there was other stuff in there, but it was the songs from Texas Rose that I knew and loved. Live, they bore up great. Ray's voice was added to here by a female counterpoint. In 'We Kept Our Kitchen Clean' and 'Thaw And The Beasts' there are a series of scratching and stretchings of strings that add a definite something, a point of reference, a wider context for the more musical bits to sit in. It has me in one when the melody starts to get uncovered from such detritus, like some fossil emerging from the desert.



On the record I'd been taken by these various effects and it was a joy to see them reproduced live, at one point Ray playing the guitar strings with a drum stick. It was though a moment of less, rather than more, accessibility and it saw one or two people taking the opportunity to sit down against the side walls. And isn't it just photographer's luck to put your camera in your pocket and miss a guitar getting the bottle neck treatment with a half full bottle of red.

The crowd wasn't huge but it was enough. Those that needed to be there were there, a self selection of those that deserved and needed to hear Castanets. God knows how I'd needed something tonight, and this was it.

This was a top performance of alt Americana, intense, everything you could hope for on a Tuesday night in north London.

We were satisfied indeed.