Yesterday night, Christopher Owens played an intimate show at St-Giles-in-the-fields church in London, merely a month after his live solo debut in San Francisco. After his ex-group Girls split up earlier this year, Owens worked on his first solo album and went on tour before the album release. Lysandre will be out on January 15th.
How’s the album like then? Pretty damn good to put it shortly. Pretty damn short too. Christopher Owens and his 7-piece band played the record in full in half an hour.
As for the music in itself, Girls’ fans won’t be disappointed. It’s got all the ingredients you could wish for. From Christopher’s sweet and soft vocals as he plays melancholic, romantic songs, to percussive pop tunes with melodies that will get stuck in your head for days to come, it’s all there. Once more, Owens proves his songwriting talent by composing catchy pop songs which somehow don’t sound too much like simple pop songs. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, love is in the hear of the listener”, he sings in one of his songs. The immediately recognizable sound of his guitar, coupled with an harmonica, a flute and a saxophone backing him, all the more in the setting of a church and its inevitable resonance, make Owen’s songs enthralling.
Apart from Girls-like tracks, the saxophone adds a new perspective to Christopher’s songs, and it’s hard not to think about the E-Street Band when the sax player launches into a possessed and powerful solo. The influence of Springsteen’s band on his album has been acknowledged by the ex-Girls’ frontman.
The album is conceived as a ‘concept album’ and the ‘Lysandre’s Theme’ that opens the record comes back throughout the whole record, alternately played on the guitar, saxophone and drums. Owens recalls his first tour with Girls and a woman he fell in love with while in France, called Lysandre.
“Thank you, this is the album. That’s the show really”, says Christopher Owens half an hour into the concert. “We have a couple of other songs to play”, he then adds. “We don’t have anywhere to go, so we’re not gonna do an encore, we’ll just play them now.” They went on to play five more songs for approximately fifteen minutes, but all covers this time. Cat Steven’s anthemic song ‘Wild World’ was followed by Donovan’s ‘Lalena’. They were both good, but the next one was mesmerizing. I did not realize until then how ‘The Boxer’ by Simon & Garfunkel matched perfectly Owens’ style and vocals. His heartfelt rendition of the song was one of the highlights of the show as far as I’m concerned. ‘Let It Be Me’, originally written by french singer Gilbert Bécaud in 1955, and famously covered in 1960 by The Everly Brothers, was the next song. The concert then ended with a beautiful version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ with Owens putting down his guitar to focus on his singing. He then picked up white roses on the side of the stage and threw them to the audience, and eventually walked down the aisle waving his hand.
And that was all. A short, 45-minute long concert, in an old church in central London. I recently read an article that said every concert should be an hour long. It was written as an answer to Springsteen’s record-breaking 4-hour long gigs. The idea was that after an hour-long concert, you leave wanting more. And I thought, well, there’s some truth to it. And no matter how short Owens’ show was, the combination of his melancholic songs, his voice, and the perfect setting of a church made this concert one to remember, and Christopher Owens an artist to admire.
Christopher Owens played :
– Lysandre’s Theme
– Here We Go
– New York City
– A Broken Heart
– Here We Go Again
– Riviera Rock
– Love Is In The Ear Of The Listener
– Lysandre
– Everywhere You Knew
– Closing Theme
– Part Of Me (Lysandre’s Epilogue)
– Wild World (Cat Stevens cover)
– Lalena (Donovan cover)
– The Boxer (Simon & Garfunkel cover)
– Let It Be Me (The Everly Brothers cover)
– Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Bob Dylan cover)
Through the smoke rings of my mind 