They’d assumed he was dead already

They’d assumed he was dead already.
Of all the one-time idols of the Sixties, Dylan was perhaps the most potent, the man even The Beatles looked up to with reverence And of them all, he alone has eluded revival His songs are rarely played on the radio Even the Sixties-loving Britpoppers hardly know who he is. It was clearly a moment of great pride for the man that, half an hour after closing-time, he was still being called back for encores.Colin Harper. Not only were they meeting one another for the very first time here in Belfast, but Williams was debuting in a venue he’d already eulogised on record simply on the strength of its reputation.Somehow handling the weird challenge of working a tough crowd while having his absolute idol watch from the front row, Williams worked hard, worked brilliantly and quite simply demanded and received even the noisiest punter’s attention with a machine-gun combination of stage presence, supreme musicianship, sheer likeability and a repertoire of original songs that – with the addition of the new album, Seven Sisters – is enviable. An increasingly brilliant writer and guitarist himself, from Statesboro, Williams’s early recording career (seven albums in as many years) was benchmarked by an obsession with Jansch. Audience reverence has almost no bearing on Jansch’s performance. Bizarrely, he chose this Belfast date to dust off the fragile, rarely played “Rosemary Lane” and, equally bizarrely, it was the brand-new “Toy Balloon” – a similarly beautiful children’s song – that finally stilled the room.Brooks Williams, going on last for logistical reasons, is a shining example of Jansch’s influence.

He just plays and sings, leaving half the room in a trance at the mesmerising blur of his voice and the still strange, inimitable quality of rolling, unresolving chord sequences made effortless.”Anji” – the instrumental on which musical ability was once judged – was played here with an intensity missing at a Dublin gig with twice the crowd and pin-drop silence just three days before. As ever, a squad of guitar buffs (all men, tolerant girlfriends in tow) grab chairs and plonk themselves down three feet from the stage. Led Zeppelin diehards, another regular contingent, make up the next phalanx, and further back are the sort of people who, quite fantastically, turn up here at acoustic guitar hero shows and spend the entire night drinking beer and talking about acoustic guitar heroes, seemingly deaf to whichever one is actually playing in the corner at the time.Characteristically if ironically, given that his highly influential melting pot of legatos, pull-offs and hammer-ons (twangs, thumps and twiddles to you) were forged out of a need to be heard unamplified in the Soho bars of the 1960s, Jansch makes no effort to attract his audience’s attention. And they don’t come any more characterful than Belfast’s Rotterdam Bar.Jansch has played the venue many times and smirks at the idea of playing before the notorious Friday-night crowd – the one that, in his experience, has turned up no matter what night of the week he’s been there. He’s not concerned: “I just want them to be known as a good band. That’s the most important qualification, because that’s the same status I prescribe for other bands. I’d like the general tag of a quality act and a quality entertainer.”`Death to the Pixies’ is released on Monday on 4AD.

Bert Jansch and Brooks Williams

Rotterdam Bar, Belfast
He’s shared bills with Hendrix, had his tunes “borrowed” by Led Zeppelin and Neil Young (in the days before copyright began to stalk the multinationals like Judge Dredd) but, 32 years after his legendary debut, Bert Jansch can still be found playing the same sort of characterful little joints he started in. It probably went on a record or two too long…”I don’t know I think some of those songs are some of the best. But when you’ve got everyone telling you `Hey, we’ve got to make another record’ and `Hey, yours is the greatest band in the world,’ you start to believe it and you don’t edit yourself as well as you should.”Black Francis agrees that, like the Velvet Underground 20 years earlier, the Pixies were destined to be highly influential but never to threaten sales of Oasis proportions. I was tired being in that band, hanging out with those people, playing all those songs I was just burnt out on it It had gone on too long. Joey and I were getting into surf instrumentals as we travelled in a Jack Nietzsche direction. It wasn’t a conscious decision to change, it was just where we were.. where I was anyway.. and Joey.”Kim Deal and David Lovering weren’t so keen.

The last magnificent gasp of the Pixies was Trompe Le Monde, which was a return to the violent lyrics of the earlier albums. The Pixies appeared once more to be back on track.The band’s break-up was thus sudden and unexpected: “I was just sad and not enjoying myself. But the cracks began to show around the time of the third album, Bossanova, with the old lyrical obsessions buried under surf guitars and songs about UFOs.Frank Black pauses to consider the change of direction: “There was just less violent imagery on Bossanova – it was still there – it was just not as apparent. They played Crystal Palace Bowl and headlined the Reading Festival in front of tens of thousands of fans. When the music press got wind of this, they relished Black Francis’s delicious sense of humour: the very cool combined with the very uncool. But in a typical twist Black Francis wasn’t joking – he loved both of them.”They’re bands I’ve enjoyed,” he says. “I’m always interested to hear whether either an alien or someone from 1,000 years ago would see that much difference between them.” This is the key to the Pixies’ continuing relevance – they weren’t bound by the rules and conventions of their age because they didn’t know them.With the release of Doolittle in 1989, the Pixies’ reputation mushroomed.