The Carpet & The Wolf

After Epping, you might have second thoughts about Clapton…

In May 2009, Eric Clapton graced the Manchester Evening News Arena, bringing his battered elegance and exquisite playing to the city that gifted Oasis to the world. He didn’t look too thrilled about it either, offering minimal interaction with the audience as he patrolled a beautiful but incongruous Persian carpet laid out centre-stage. In truth, it was more a recital of sterile perfection than a concert: a precision-engineered tableau for fourteen extended versions of fan favourites, obscure but well-chosen covers, and a few blues standards.

A week later, much more at home in the rarefied grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, he repeated the exercise — right down to conjuring a note of soaring, improbable, ecstatic purity at a specific point during Cocaine. The lighting man knew to pick out the pickups of the Great Man’s Stratocaster with a single, searing blue beam, intensifying the sensory overload and making me question the wisdom of having never sampled Bolivian marching powder.

Present on both occasions was The Carpet, and both times none of the other performers — all accomplished and famous musicians in their own right — dared step onto it, no doubt having been instructed by their ‘people’ that this was verboten.

Sixteen years later, at the Hemnall Social Club in Epping, there is no carpet. Just a writhing spaghetti of cables and wires of variable girth and markings, that resembles the Reptile House at London Zoo — a trip hazard sufficiently acute to make HSE Wombles soil themselves — as the Big Wolf Band are introduced, Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club style, by the compere…

I’d first come across them a couple of years ago in Chimay, Belgium. Returning from the Queen Mary pub — oddly named, as Belgium’s never had one — and its celebrated Pax Dieu beer, I lurched back to the smart little apartment I’d rented. Sitting on the terrace overlooking the town, the strains of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here floated across the darkened rooftops, one of an expertly curated playlist of songs I’d never heard before.

Thanks to Shazam, I discovered these included Hey Joe (B) from Otis Taylor’s Red Meat album of Hendrix covers; Tony Joe White’s You’re Gonna Look Good in Blues; Same Thing by Todd Wolfe; and finally, the coruscating Darkest of My Days by the Brummie blues combo who have travelled from Birmingham to Essex this October afternoon to perform, before heading back up the M1 and M6.

Fronted by Jonathan Earp — shaggy white-grey mane, pebble-lens sunglasses — he resembles the rather cool-looking bear that flogged Cresta fizzy pop in the 1970s (“It’s frothy, man”… Now you remember…) as his band blaze their way through two hours of all-original material that oozes quality.

The stagecraft is somewhere between minimal and non-existent, but the playing is mesmerising. The songs have a nagging permanence about them. Despite being new to most ears here, they are reassuringly familiar without descending to carbon copies of more established material.

Given the genre, comparisons with Clapton — and, on occasion, David Gilmour — are inevitable but deserved. Earp has the fluency and tone of both, right down to the extended, howling notebending accompanied by the ecstatic, eyes-closed, money-shot pose that many in the audience unconsciously mimic.

But this is no one-man band. Timo Jones’s drumming brings the metronomic, Black Country industrial power of the late John Bonham, along with his less celebrated delicacy and grace when the moment demands it. Meanwhile, Justin Johnson (guitar and vocals) and Mike Hatton (bass) provide a foundation of solid, polished, understated quality.

Their combined age is probably somewhere north of two hundred, but they’re kept young by keyboard player Arran Shanghavi, who has mastered the tech to provide authentic and inspired contributions — from the wheezing, eerie simulation of a Hammond organ to the grand piano falling-down-the-stairs flourish that recalls the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan.

If this sounds like overblown praise, it’s because this is one of the best bands in their genre you’ve never heard of. If you’ve ever been to Printer’s Alley in Nashville or Beale Street in Memphis and marvelled at the passion and talent of the bar bands there, this crew operate at the same improbably high level — just a lot closer to home.

Before saying his goodnights, Jon thanks the audience for coming out on a Tuesday to hear mainly original compositions — the only cover saved for an encore. He explains that smaller venues generally prefer tribute bands — a more reliable draw. In fairness to UK audiences, that’s understandable. A lot of new material from unknown bands is a) not up to much and b) not very well performed. And when you can go to the New Flowerpot in Derby and hear R.E.M.’s back catalogue expertly plundered by Stipe by R.E.M. - a recent example - why risk your Saturday night out?

At the time of writing, you can see Eric doing his thing next year in Kraków, Budapest, or Prague. Christ knows what you’ll pay for the privilege, but I guarantee you won’t be able to get the Tube home, and it’ll probably cost more than £25 for your ticket and a couple of beers. All of which begs the inevitable question: would it be worth it?

There will be some whose musical sensibilities are so finely attuned, no alternatives will suffice. For whom it’s a quasi-religious experience worth braving Ryanair indignities and a scuzzy Airbnb for, even if your £500 concert seat only gets you a view of the man and his carpet through binoculars or on a huge, 8K screen. Others will make a long weekend of it — a Relais & Châteaux stay, perhaps, then the full-hospitality concert treatment with an air-conned Merc to ferry one to and from the venue. Just another pleasant midweek diversion, the cost of which is incidental. Or it might be you’re a cynical box-ticking, bucket-list, been there, seen it, heard it, done it, got-the-selfie-to-prove-it, philistine — and if that’s the case, I really don’t know what to say to you.

But for the rest of us — those who crave the up-close, sweaty, messy, exhilarating act of creation — there’s really no contest. If you love live music, anywhere on the broad spectrum of rock and blues, ground out by a five-piece at the top of their game, seek out these committed, talented troubadours as they thread their way up and down the highways and byways of the UK.

Forget the carpet. Find the Wolf. You’ll have a better time.