Forty Sense

This might not have been the greatest day of music I've ever seen, but it's the sort of thing that should always be celebrated.

FORTY YEARS OF PROMOTION, PRODUCTION & PERFORMANCE, ITS ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC, Port Mahon, 2/9/23 

This event is part of a month-long celebration of local promoter Osprey’s career spanning 40 years onstage, at the mixing desk, or at the helm of multiple gigs. There’s palpable love for the man himself on display from today’s punters and performers, and this reflects Osprey’s greatest trait as a promoter: passion. There are legions of successful musicians who got their first break at one of Osprey’s nights, as he took a chance on some nascent promise, and there are other acts to whom Os has stayed loyal for years, even if they’ve never picked up a following. Every healthy music scene needs this sort of supportive underpinning, just as much as it needs hip young gunslingers and breakout successes, and with that in mind this review will highlight acts who may not have had much previous coverage in this magazine (and if you need to know that he didnt, Beaver Fuel, The Foam Heads, and Matt “Charms Against The Evil Eye” Sewell are worth your time we prescribe Nightshifts passim, stet).  

The garden hosts a surprisingly varied roster, and starts strong with uke-slinger Bill Frizzell. His runaway -jalopy run through the top 10 singles from 40 years ago is unpretentious fun, but his musical setting of diary extracts from his time building Australian railroads in the 70s is brilliantly funny and dramatic: a one-man Edinburgh show surely beckons. Nash also has a playful approach to covers, mashing up contemporary pop culture tunes with a bit of hip-hop and a bourbon-blessed blues growl, but Paul Lodge makes him look predictable by comparison: the garden might have the vibe of an open mic night, but how often do you see people setting words by Nietzsche, Wordsworth, and a 12-century visionary abbess to delicate Dylanish music at your local? 

Tiger Mendoza is a name well known to Nightshift readers, of course, but how many times have we seen Ian de Quadros barrel through his tunes with only a trusty acoustic? Even shorn of their electro-hip-hop settings his songs stand up and his voice proves to be strong enough to take the spotlight...also, weirdly, he does the second cover of the day of ‘No Diggity’ - the Blackstreet revival starts here, we guess. Ben Jacobs deserves praise for turning in two sets of fluent, assured songs, but our favourite new find is The Station, a Newbury trio whose high-energy romp-pop falls somewhere between The Jam’s socially conscious concision and the fringe-flicking sensibilities of early Gene. Finding yourself in a small room, tapping a foot to a band who look like they’re having the time of their lives might not make the headlines, but captures the spirit of an Osprey event. We're looking forward to the fiftieth anniversary already.