Review: Dean & Britta in their living room

Last night Dean & Britta played their third fourth live streamed concert since lockdown and the first one at a sensible time for European fans. For this one they also roped in Roger Brogan to help with the sound and to play drums.

The duo have decided to used the Veeps platform for the concerts which consensus seems to suggest was a wise decision as the sound quality is pretty good although for the first ten minutes of last night’s performance you wouldn’t have known that as the show started without sound. After a couple of minutes of their opener the message that the only people who could hear the show were the three folk in D&B’s living room the event ground to a halt. With some knob twiddling and a call to tech support things were finally resolved and the concert restarted with My Rifle, My Pony and Me from Dean and Cheval Sombre’s album of cowboy songs from a couple of years back.

Once the sound was restored it became clear that this show was a step-up from previous ones, the addition of drums and Roger’s hand at the engineering wheel was certainly making a difference - next up was Galaxie 500’s Leave The Planet followed by Opal’s Hear The Wind Blow.

The set continued with a run of Galaxie 500 tracks with Dean & Britta’s You Turned My Head Around slotted in the middle (always a joy to hear and see Britta during that one). Dean also gave a couple of poetry readings and threw in some banter and told some stories.

Among the Galaxie 500 tracks was a beautiful rendition of Sorry - written by Damon and a heartbreaking insight into a band crumbling - “Seems it doesn’t make a difference, and were sorry all the time” - it was beautiful to hear and probably hasn’t been performed live by any former Galaxie 500 members since their last tour in 1991 - the late Tom Rapp covered it at a Terrastock show back in 1998.

The show finished with an encore of a cover of Donovan’s Sadness and then a perfect Ceremony.

Definitely the best of the three shows so far - and an absolute joy to see them live. The Veeps platform has a chat that was quite active during the show and was nice to have some level of interaction with other fans… lovely to see so many familiar faces in there.

You can still buy and watch the show on Veeps for a week or so - so head over and check it out.

The one thing that was really missed was band/audience and inter-audience feedback.

• the band tried to keep an eye on the chat but it clearly isn’t possible in any meaningful way - the delays and the silence of it mean that they aren’t really reacting at all - this was most blatantly clear during the silent rendtion of the opening track - the fact that it took two minutes before Dean & Britta realised that nobody could hear was telling.
• audience interaction with each other, while better, was also hard. Chat went past too quickly at times - the Veeps platform didn’t allow @ comments or private comments or for the audience to break into smaller groups (not sure if this would work at all).
• the inability to actually hear an audience made things feel a little off, it’s almost as if you want a second stream so the audience and the band could see and hear each other - again not sure how/if this would work but I missed that probably more than anything else - I’m not a social person but I do miss being among fans!

Dean suggested that they may release audio of the shows at some point… so watch this space. He also mentioned the series of lathe cut singles that would be released soon - not too much additional information, except that their cover of Donovan’s Sadness would be included. Again… watch this space for more details.

Full setlist (posted to Dean’s Instagram):

• My Rifle, My Pony and Me
• Leave The Planet
• Hear The Wind Blow
• When Will You Come Home
• poem: The Canoeing Trip by Russell Eldon
• King of Spain
• Parking Lot
• Snowstorm
• You Turned My Head Around
• Blue Thunder
• poem: Extract from The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner
• Sorry
• Victory Garden
• Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste
• Sadness
• Ceremony

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