A magical evening of indie-folk from a well-connected US singer-songwriter.

If you were to believe in God you might suspect he is trying to send someone a message this evening. Firstly, on the tube at Edgeware Road a radical Christian street preacher gets on and proceeds to tell me, well the whole train car, not me in particular, that we are all going to hell unless we repent – which I get to hear in various forms for the next ten tube stops. At times like this I wonder what one of my writing heroes Hunter S. Thompson would do. He would have somehow ended up with the preacher in at least ten different drinking establishments, at which point the preacher would wake up the next morning not entirely sure how any of the ensuing madness that evening had happened, having likely contravened numerous articles of his faith. As a teetotal individual who has never used drugs I instead carry on listening to Christian Lee Hutson on my wireless headphones.

I have seen a few venues in my time, but St Matthias Church is up there on the quirkier end of the scale. Quite a few churches put live music on these days to help pay the bills, but not many have fixed pews in the music space. The toilets are back out the church and through an opened door in a wall leading to the primary school next door. There is one adult toilet open and a block of four three-quarter sized toilets designed for primary age children. The cistern for each one takes about five minutes to refill after every flush. Broken Britain and its crumbling school infrastructure in all its glory. It all seems a bit of an odd place for the only scheduled UK gig of a US singer-songwriter with over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, who has worked with Phoebe Bridger and Conor Oberst and is dating Maya Hawke, actor in Stranger Things. Even more so when you consider we are a few minutes walk from EartH with its theatre and hall.

Matthew Herd

Support tonight comes from Matthew Herd who is the main creative force behind Seafarers, as well as providing saxophone and keyboards to a range of other projects. Christian Lee Hutson later descibes him as, “One of my favourite songwriters” which is high calibre praise seeing the company he moves in. Tonight, it is just Matthew and his keyboard. He plays a full set of material from a solo album he is planning to record in the Summer. Seafarers are a mix of indie rock, chamber pop and jazz. This performance carries a bit more of a classic British music hall/ musical theatre vibe and is a huge amount of fun.

Matthew has a winning mix of, what seems like, shy introspection crossed with a more outgoing comedic self-deprecation. Titles are all along the lines of ‘Sambuca in the Park With Kelly’ and ‘Lincolnshire Forgives.’ There are fun tracks on wry topics, such as all the stolen things from around the world that end up in British Museums.

He blows the cover of famous children’s illustrator and author Chris Riddell, who is sat sketching on the front row for the entire evening (a number of them can be seen on his Instagram account). Every song brings smiles and laughter from the audience. I would jot down a few of the lyrics but it would ruin the first-listen comedic value. Keep an ear out for future releases and have a listen to Seafarers in the meantime.

Christian Lee Hutson

This appearance is nominally in support of the special edition version of his last album, ‘Paradise Pop. 10 Deluxe’. He has a handful of other European dates including a couple of festivals in Spain. I don’t know how involved he was in picking the venue, but it puts him in a very reflective mood for the evening. Hutson went to a fundamentalist Christian School for a number of his early school years, and his grandmother was a fire and brimstone Southern Baptist Preacher. There probably should have been a TMI warning issued before the performance started!

On record Christian Lee Hutson is fairly minimalist indie-folk with elements of country, a singer-songwriter mostly using acoustic guitar. There is generally some additional instrumentation and sometimes there is a full band and electric guitar. Phoebe Bridger has produced big chunks of his last three albums and he co-wrote ‘KetchumID,’ one of the songs on Boygenius’ debut 2018 EP. He has a style that creeps up on you. It could feel a little too similarly paced throughout, with a singing style that doesn’t shift very often, but the amazing worldbuilding of his songs grabs hold and draws you in. These are not throwaway lyrics, all are well considered, many can be insightful and sometimes they are utterly devastating.

Tonight, Hutson is accompanied by Odessa Jorgensen on violin as on the rerecorded versions of a number of tracks for the Deluxe version of the album , just the two of them seated in front of the pews. After one song Christian is reflecting on his grandmother. How he would be taken to religious events where people would end up moved by the spirit and speaking in tongues. He explains how he would find himself standing up and deliberately spouting gibberish because then everyone, “would tell you that you were a good boy.”

After ‘Carousel Horses’ Hutson pauses again and continues discussing some of the feelings being in a church space brings up in him. He goes into great length about the out of body/near death experience that led him to write about heaven. This requires much background. First he explains he has extremely strong OCD, which he has written about in ‘OCDemon.’ That going to sleep is very hard for him and involves a three hour process of making a nest because, ‘I am a child’ and has to watch TV for hours (usually Modern Family) on an Ipad at the peak of the nest. An important part of this ritual is his ‘weed pen.’ On one occassion his brain was telling him he hadn’t taken a hit so he kept taking a hit and taking a hit. Everything went like an old Instagram vignette. Modern Family didn’t exist anymore. He was Modern Family. “All of this is to say heaven is real. There are many fountains and Toby Carveries… and Ladbrokes.” Until a DEEP VOICE spoke to him, “This guy, sorry… it was a guy,” and said you have to go back now and tell them what you saw. And then he plays ‘After Hours.’

It is a rather magical hour and a quarter of music. The crowd is a mix of curious locals and big fans who have made the effort to get to this show. It is a very pleasant audience who were all chatting to each other before the acts and swapping tales and stories. Everyone laps up the honesty of the between song chats and the quality of the performance.

We get another church memory. One of the more outrageous drugs related stories I have heard an artist share on stage. Christian relates how he had a rebellious phase at fifteen and how he was hanging out with older teenagers and men doing cocaine. One of those occasions was the night before his grandmother’s funeral. He was standing around in the church sweating and feeling awful in a suit. Then he saw his grandmother walk in and Christian was thinking no one had told him cocaine could cause hallucinations like this. She walked straight over to him and hugged him. She said, “You must be Christian” and he said, “Yes I am.” He thought, “Wow, cocaine is too much” as she was walking away from him. Then his Mum came over and told him his gran had a twin they had never mentioned to him who had flown in for the funeral!

There are so many tales in these songs, they are all great, but a few stand out more than others. I particularly enjoyed ‘Candyland,’ ‘Beauty School’ and ‘Strawberry Lemonade’ this evening.

Hutson is not a well-known name in this country, but on this evidence, he is a genuine talent, an honest and warm human being with a slightly wicked sense of humour. He creates characters that inhabit his songs and spins whole worlds for them to exist in out of the tiniest of moments and observations. When discussing inspirations, he is as likely to suggest a fiction author as he is another musician. You can tell a lot about a musician by the company they keep, and with Hutson it says he brings a lot to the table, to move with some of the most important musicians out there right now. Who knows when he will next be back in the UK, or in what random venue, it will be worth seeking out and attending though.