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Elly Roberts reviews
Righteous Babe
- Cert:
- Pressing: 2008
- Region(s): 0, PAL
- Running time: 861 minutes
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English
- Widescreen: 16:9, plus live CD of 10 selected tracks
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £17.99
- Rating: 8/10
- Tracks: 18 include Napoleon, Present/Infant, Independence Day, SundayMorning, Alla This, little Plastic Castle, Overlap*Contains some swearing*
Socially conscienced folk babe plays Babeville. Her venue debut.
Recorded live at Babeville, Buffalo, New York on September 11/12 2007, AniDifranco played two sold out gigs at her own venue.
Babeville had been a labour of love for nigh-on a decade, saving and regeneratingthe 135 year old former Delaware Avenue Methodist church, which has beenmorphed into a state of the art facility and community arts space.
In front of her home crowd, Angela Mari Difranco, 36 at time of show, shedelivered a warm, and often passionate, intimate performance. But below theeasy flowing charm is a woman of substance as she continues to have a popat all things that deeply bother her racism, homophobia, poverty, war, sexualabuse and reproductive rights a very powerful cannon.
For the uninitiated, Difranco has a unique folk based template characterised bya staccato style incorporating rapid finger picking and several alternatetunings, delivering many of her lines in a speaking mode notable for its rhythmicvariation, in the process becoming a cult figure for her opinionated views.
With her new backing band, she serves up a feast for her ardent fanbase on bothDVD and CD debuting new songs with oldies. It takes a few minutes to kick offdue to the backstage and street shots, but its worth the short wait. Guitarin hand, she enters to rapturous applause, as any local girl would do. Clearlythrilled, beaming and restless she shoots with Napoleon with virtually everylyric getting a huge reaction.
On Swim she displays a fine technical style plucking and strumming thelightweight poppy ballad. Switching style with ease, she funks-up on the jazzygroove of Fuel featuring some deft bassline ripples from upright bassist ToddSickafoose and Mike Dillon on vibes. They do much the same on Paradigmallowing her to strum the goodies with style.
Eventually she eggs-on the crowd to clap along to Shy but it soon fadesas she digs deep on a solo spot. Up until Shy, things had been prettyfull-on and effusive, so a gentle change of pace is brought via a beautifulballad You Had Your Time, though further in she gushes on her trademarkstaccato stylings for Gravel. After a night of regular guitar rotation sheends with sweet ballad Hypnotized.
The crowd obviously were.
File under: Big in Buffalo. Needs bigger audience for her cause.
Weblinks:myspace.com/anidifranco /babevillebuffalo.com /righteousbabe.com#
Elly Roberts passed away in 2011, but he was a man who was so passionate about all types of music and loved meeting his musical heroes, such as Mick Hucknall at a book signing at the Trafford Centre, Manchester in 2007.
A former teacher and also a music journalist, DJ and radio presenter on local community station Calon FM, plus appearances on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru and BBC Radio 2, Elly started doing reviews for DVDfever.co.uk in 2004 and he did the majority of the CD and concerts reviews on the website.
I know also that he loved getting away for the summer to Spain and I hope that wherever he is now he is enjoying the hot sunshine and, as one of his friends has said on his Facebook page, that he is interviewing his musical heroes.