lefty Unplugged

Lefty is a musician performing in the United Kingdom and he is a brilliant lyricist.  His words are highly imaginative and are always penetrating yet there is a romance to all of them.  He accompanies his songs with electric guitar or acoustic guitars and he has an excellent technique for improvised play.  Sometimes he will play an instrumental number and will make it up as he goes, mixing chords on a looper with a magical style of lead that comes as wind blowing through the trees.






Lefty Unplugged was improvising from the first note last night at Cat's Art MusikCircus and he also wore his yellow slippers so let's get a good look at those.





Whether the bunny slippers have anything to do with magic or improvisation is left for the interested student to determine. What I do know is that Lefty Unplugged / Kevin Farrell launched into a brilliant looper improvisation that was intricate but with sophisticated dynamics and which has buried anyone's thought that he's not much of a guitar player. If you've read previous reports, you know I never believed that anyway but he was really on a tear last night, making it up as he went along.

The name of that first one was "There It Was ... Gone" and now he knows I really do take notes (laughs).  The song had no name before he started as the name came after he was finished and I'm pretty sure he didn't record it so there was was ... and now it's gone, except for anyone who heard it.

This is one of the biggest attractions and intrigues in me for music in that one can't keep it.  It can be frozen on a CD but it will never be live again, the CD just lets you listen to it one more time.  That transience is a magical thing and Lefty understands it well.   Early in the show, Ellie asked if anyone had heard about Boston (i.e. event in the news) and I had but I didn't want it intruding on the show so I hadn't said anything. The conversation was short and I don't think Lefty saw it as I'm sure it would have affected his music.

lefty Unplugged feels things very much, everything from a fox with bad case of mange that comes around his place to a flock of sparrows he has adopted.  Much has been said online recently about his performances but it comes from a selfish and deliberately-misinformed source.  The man's sensitivity is quite apparent and it shows in every note he plays, every note he sings.

It was a brilliant performance and Lefty was casually throwing out some stunning lead lines on the guitar.  This wasn't grandstanding at all as you wouldn't probably even realise it if you weren't paying attention, they whizzed by that fast.  Despite his protestations to the contrary, he's an excellent guitarist and I still wonder if there's a dirty little heavy metal secret in his past.