54. Ben Harper
London Palladium
27 April 2014
Let’s be honest, I went into this gig knowing roughly three things about Ben Harper. One, he’s apparently big in Australia. Two, he’s the kind of musician people describe as a “multi-instrumentalist” with the reverence usually reserved for heart surgeons. And three, he plays a lot of acoustic guitars. Still, my pal swore blind he was transcendent, and as a loyal friend (and having already turned him, regularly, into a bit of a cultural hostage to my musical whims), I said yes. So off we trotted to the London Palladium, one of those venues where you feel like you should be wearing something made of velvet.
Harper took to the stage, promptly sat down, and barely moved for the next two hours, except to casually rearrange the emotional architecture of the room with a series of low-key, soul-scraping ballads. No pyro, no chest-thumping crescendos, no guitars crying out in anguish. Just one man, a lap steel, a whole lot of feeling, and the faint whiff of sandalwood.
It was all very... civilised. Like someone had taken the concept of a gig and gently steeped it in herbal tea. Harper is good, no, exceptional, at what he does. The melodies are intricate, the lyrics poetic without being pretentious, and his voice has the kind of warm, husky resonance that makes you feel like you’re being hugged by sound. But let’s not pretend it didn’t stretch. What should’ve been a crisp ninety-minute set gradually unfolded into something resembling a BBC4 boxset. And then came the encore.
An encore that was less a bonus and more a second act. Eleven songs. Split into two halves. At one point, I half expected a stagehand to come out with a sleeping bag and a sign stating: “It’s going to be a while.”
Look, Ben, we love you, we do, but some of us have jobs in the morning, and one of us has a bladder shaped like a thimble. When your encore has its own encore, we’re no longer clapping, we’re negotiating with the concept of time.
Just as we were teetering on the edge of folk-induced fatigue, he pulled out his trump card: he brought out his mum. His actual, real-life mum. And not just for a wave and a cuppa, she sang. They performed a duet so tender and utterly disarming that the entire Palladium collectively melted into a puddle of sniffles and maternal guilt. You could hear hearts breaking and people texting their mothers under their seats. It was like being ambushed by a hug from someone who smells like cookies and wisdom.
Would I see Ben Harper again? Possibly, but only if there’s a strict, government-enforced limit on encores. Still, anyone who can summon that kind of intimacy in a room full of strangers and harmonise with their mum? You’ve got to respect it. Just maybe next time... edit.