It is hard to fathom the appeal of Stephen Fretwell, and this show did not make it any easier. Still in his early twenties, the singer and songwriter originally from Scunthorpe but now resident in Manchester, has updated the role of the acoustic folk troubadour with his highly regarded debut album, Magpie. But apart from adding a handful of swear words and a heavy dose of northern attitude, he has done little to tamper with the musical vocabulary or staid traditions of the genre.
In person on stage he looked and sounded just like any other worried man with an acoustic guitar. Dressed in a nondescript brown top, he took a sip from a giant red, Coca-Cola beaker, and then mumbled something about a new song while he fixed a capo on his guitar. He sang a couple of numbers on his own — both slow and introspective — before being joined by his three-man backing band. The mood remained sombre, the pace torpid as they meandered through Bad Bad You, Bad Bad Me. “You move like violence, darling/ You’re stubborn as they get me every time,” he sang in a generic folk-singer’s voice. It sounded pretty serious, but meaning remained stubbornly elusive. As did the precise nature of this man’s charm.
The Empire was jammed full of hip young people from the iPod generation, their radios at home doubtless tuned in to the cutting-edge, indie-rock station XFM. But Fretwell looked and sounded as if he should have been hanging around at one of the alternative tents at the Cambridge Folk Festival. An old head on young shoulders, he came across at various moments like Damien Rice without the intensity, Badly Drawn Boy without the personality and David Gray without the mass-market hits.
After the slow, descending sequence of Play, the band departed and Fretwell managed to coax a brief audience singalong during his solo rendition of Emily. A sequence of instant encores produced New York, the song everyone had been waiting for.
Fretwell is obviously supplying a demand for something. But it was unusual to see a show of this sort at which, either physically or emotionally, so little actually happened.
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The bass player in Green on Red is Jack Waterson, not Dan Waterson, as stated in my review of January 12. My apologies.