Live Review : Paul Gilbert + Blackballed @ Academy 3, Manchester on September 19th 2019

Tonight’s support band Blackballed are, it seems, a bit of a last-minute shoe-in. So much so that their drummer has never actually played with them before. With that in mind, he actually did a pretty good job of it! They are a 3-piece band with good hats and beards, and they play fuzzy bass-driven blues rock. They play it pretty well, there are some time changes and a couple of nice instrumental breaks but mostly, it’s bluesy with an occasional touch of jazziness. The sound puts me in mind of early ZZ Top, and there are worse things to listen to than that, right? They go down well, and I enjoyed watching them.

There are few things I learned tonight about Paul Gilbert. Most of them came from that irritating bunch of guys stood near the bar talking loudly over the support band, gosh how I hate them. But it does mean that I learn that apparently in the mid noughties Mr G forged himself a new and somewhat unlikely career as a pop star in Japan before coming back to his first love of rock. You don’t get inside info like that off wiki, although I have no idea if it’s actually true or not! Still, it’s a nice thought so I’m keeping it.

The other thing I learned is that Mr Gilbert is, in the immortal words of the trucking chocolate bar, Not For Girls. Seriously. In a surprisingly-busy-for-a-Thursday Academy 3, there were probably less than a dozen women. I can’t puzzle this one out, unless it’s perhaps because he is very much a musician’s musician, a guitar maestro, and playing guitar is not a feminine hobby on the whole?

He comes on looking for all the world like a stockbroker on his way home from the office, and immediately launches into a fast and furious shred-fest. There are no vocals tonight, this is a show that lets the guitar do all the talking. Despite having a competent backing band tonight’s show is about one thing and one thing only, and that’s the variety of sound that can be squeezed out of an electric guitar.

Genres are smashed. There’s jazz, funk, a lot of blues, rock in all shades and speeds, some retro wahwah, pretty much anything you could possibly want a guitar to do is covered. He opens with a couple of tracks from his most recent album “Behold Electric Guitar”. ‘Blues for Rabbit’ is followed by ‘Havin’ It’. Next up is something more familiar, a blistering version of Mr Big’s ‘Green Tinted 60s Mind’ and then much to my surprise the theme from ‘Rocky’.

Between songs we get some talk about how the new songs were constructed, and what influenced them. Paul also breaks into song a couple of times to illustrate a melody and I am surprised that for a man who doesn’t sing during the set, he actually seems to have a rather pleasing voice. ‘Let That Battery Die’ is played on a very pretty purple guitar and I winder if that’s because it has more than a nod towards the work of Prince to it. It’s funky, with some excellent slide.

The tracks are very technical and I’m sure if I knew anything at all about chord progressions and such I could waffle on for hours but I don’t, and I have to admit that I am starting to get just a teeny bit restless as one complicated solo follows the next, complete with facial grimaces. It’s therefore a relief to find that there is something of a comedy break. Paul recites a poem for us whilst he is playing ‘A Herd Of Turtles’ but as he doesn’t like his own speaking voice much he does it in the style of Ringo Starr. No, really. Jazz-funk guitar and a poem about life, done in a deadpan fake scouse accent. You kind of had to be there!

Next, we get a bit of a covers-fest and despite no vocals and the guitar taking on the melody, I smile as he plays ‘Carry On Wayward Son’,  ‘Running With The Devil’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Still I’m Sad’. I’m a bit surprised that the crowd go with the instrumental theme and don’t sing the choruses though. Talking of the crowd, they too are a bit of a strange beast tonight. They stand transfixed during every song, straining it seems to take in every note, then burst into wild applause at the end. But there is no air guitar, no head-shaking, none of the stuff you would normally expect to see at a gig. Just total absorption as the let the power of the playing wash over them. Odd.

He finishes with two more of his own songs ‘Things Can Walk To You’ and ‘Love Is The Saddest Thing’. I’m a little surprised that, bar a couple of notes of the intro during his between-song talking, he doesn’t play his ‘That Song’, but then I realise that he has been on stage for just a few minutes short of 2 hours and despite expecting to be a bit bored because of the lack of vocals, I have actually been riveted by pretty much every second of it. Did I say earlier that he was Not For Girls? Nah, this one, loved it.