“He was some kind of a man”. And with these words Tanya described Hank Quinlan in Orson Welles’ motion picture masterpiece Touch of Evil. In conversation in the bar with Matthew Johnson before tonight’s show, the Hookworm’s frontman said that listening to Daughn Gibson made him question whether he was a boy or a girl. Having now spent three quarters of an hour in the musical company of the man who was born Josh Martin but who plies his trade under a stage sobriquet that pays homage to the long-time gone country singer Don Gibson and bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan, it does seem to be much less about identity and gender than it is about the music.
But that said it still remains difficult to separate the two. Daughn Gibson is tall, dark and handsome, his huge brooding presence perfectly suited to the role of an anti-hero in some modern film noir. His music reflects such sinister characterisation, the dark, oppressive rumble of his deep baritone its magnetic focal point. Tonight, sadly, a rather flat sound production in the Games Room at the Brudenell reduces the overall impact of its brutal force, though his voice still remains an impressively powerful instrument that pitches itself somewhere between latter-day Jim Morrison and early Chuck Prophet.
What may have been lost around the edges of Gibson’s vocal delivery on the night is more than compensated for by the sheer potency of the music that surrounds him. James Elkington on guitars is a revelation. He whips up the electrical storm that wraps itself around the
darkness of Gibson’s everyday words about everyday people; when Elkington moves onto the lap steel the music just takes off and soars, propelled even further along that lonesome highway by the clattering incessancy of Reefer’s drums. For all of the derivatives of Daughn Gibson’s name the end musical product is neither country nor is it blues. It is more a runaway train of sound heading down a track that bisects a cinematic landscape somewhere between Sergio Leone and Sin City.
In the closing scene of Touch of Evil, Marlene Dietrich’s Tanya posed the question “what does it matter what you say about people?” In Daughn Gibson’s case probably not that very much; his music does all the talking for him and unlike Hank Quinlan his future is most definitely not yet used up.
