David Ford's tour to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his debut album I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I've Caused rolled into Hebden Bridge Trades Club on Saturday night for a sold-out show. Accompanied by Demi Marriner, Ed Blunt and Emily Grove who each performed a couple of their own songs before David's set, he revisited and reinvented his debut album to an adoring crowd.
David Ford takes to the stage around 8.30pm and addresses the crowd about his bandmates for the tour, joking about the closeness of the bond they've forged over the two weeks of the tour and more seriously telling us how he set out to find the best singers he could find to accompany him. We're then treated to two songs each by each of them.
Demi Marriner starts off with a song called Repeat Refrain from her recent album The Things I Said on acoustic guitar. Her voice stands out immediately, rich and expressive and most importantly natural rather than the attempts to put on singing voices to fit in that are plaguing many vocalists these days. A second song, a new one, called Thinking Of Me is reflective, looking back and considering that she should put herself first, delivered with that same open and genuine honesty that makes the crowd warm to her.
Ed Blunt (no relation, he hastens to point out) is next with his two songs. The first is on acoustic guitar and is dedicated to his grandfather whilst for the second he moves to the piano after informing us that his nickname of Iron Man was because he irons his shirts before he goes on stage. The second song tells a story of him kissing a girl and then facing the violent consequences of his action from her irate boyfriend, told with a sense of humour and delivered musically to perfectly align with the story itself.
The final opening act is Emily Grove, who's on her final show of this tour unless, she jokes, she can find herself a Green Card wedding. Having toured with David back in 2013, she's familiar to many in the crowd so gets the warmest reaction of the three. She starts with Thinking Out Loud, a song that she calls one of the two happy songs she's ever written and finishes with an a cappella track that demonstrates why David chose her if he was picking the best vocalists he knows as the Trades falls silent other than the clatter from the bar next door to listen.
After a short interval the four of them take to the stage and strike up into a song that clearly isn't I Don't Care What You Call Me, the album's opening track. It's a much lesser known early David Ford track called This Is Not Desire which he explains at the end could be found on original versions of the album by starting playing it and then rewinding it and finding it in the run-in to the opening song. Such were the CD gimmicks of the late 90s through to the mid 2000s.
It's then followed by a run through I Sincerely Apologise... and like David Ford's shows across the past twenty years, his willingness to experiment with different musicians means that it's not the same tired run-through that many of these album shows are. Songs are reinvented like a "sexy as" Don't Tell Me, a song about saving someone from themselves and their despair, whilst State Of The Union, preceded by him telling us how the song brought him to much wider attention than the small basement venues he started his solo career in, takes on new life every time it's played as he uses the loop pedals to layer sound upon sound as it builds to a conclusion that never feels the same ever.
Cheer Up You Miserable Fuck has the audience singing along, once David has told us we don't need to, but as a traditional set-closer around album release, no one was going to listen to that. Don't Tell Me and What Would You Have Me Do have a harder edge to them, whilst A Long Time Ago and Katie benefit from Ed's piano and Demi and Emily's vocals. Every song is given an introduction and some insight into the story behind it so much that the fourteen songs of the night extend to close to two hours, but the room is spellbound by these songs and the manner in which they're performed.
The I Sincerely Apologise.. section is completed by the album's final track Laughing Aloud, a momentous epic that sadly doesn't feature too often in David's setlists these days before four more songs to send us off into the night. The first Pour A Little Poison is sped up and accelerates as the song goes on, with the four vocals coming together like a hypnotic chant and is probably the highlight of the night. It's followed by I'm Alright Now, a single from Songs For The Road, the follow-up to I Sincerely Apologise, and then a duet between David and Emily of One Of These Days before she departs back to the US at the end of her stint on the tour. The evening finishes with a cover of George Michael's Freedom 90, with David once again referencing the vocal talents he's gathered together.
Twenty years on since witnessing these songs in small London venues and watching David's star rise as the live to camera State Of The Union video did his bidding for him and with a career-spanning (he explains at one point how much he hates that word but can't think of an alternative) retrospective in the pipeline, tonight took us back on a journey through an album that will always hold memories of a time and places and reminded us of the unique artistry that David Ford brings to his live shows, always pushing himself and those playing with him as well as the songs in new and different ways. He's sick of being told that he should have had far more success than he did, but facts don't lie.
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