"Home is where your heart comes from" Adem sings in "Everything you need". He certainly worked hard to make everybody feel welcome at the Homefires Festival.

First, the choice of venue : Conway Hall, the Ethical Society Centre. For the average thirty-something mediaoid male whose brain is brilloed weeklong by corporate speech, Conway Hall feels like a respite centre. You can see them walk round with a paper cup in their hands, flicking through the alternative lifestyle books, or smiling perplexedly at the faded humanist cut-out quotes on the walls. The girls all look mad, sporting homemade skirts and diagonal hair, making me feel relieved I decided to leave the sensible clothes at home after all.

Then the deco : granny lampshades, bedside lamps and battered armchairs liven up the stern wooden stage, which is surmounted by the inscription TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE.

Finally the bill : Smog, Meon, Adem, Joanna Newsom and Willy Mason. Most have been furrowing my C :/Drive for the past few months, while i was busy typing away. And as I was about to lift a brow and notice some artistic consistency, about to grasp some musical concept, Adem put it there right before me : home music. Homemade, homeward, homely, homey, home.

Home doesn’t require any explanation, glamorisation, popularisation, segmentation, process or mediation. If these words are associated to home, it’s primarily as burglary techniques. The music of the Homefires festival doesn’t need any of it. It makes it effortlessly through the walls of our fortresses, leaving the salesmen outside desperately groping for the magic key and staring through the windows at the dancing shadows.

Meon

Inside, people are sitting on the polished wooden floors, seemingly ready to applaud a school panto. Adem waves and introduces the man in the lumberjack shirt, Marc Meon. The band’s set is a lovely mix of boy/girl harmonies, flute, xylophone and northern romance. They perform just enough songs to pluck a flower by and they are already gone.

Willy Mason

Willy Mason rubs his eyes and starts tuning his guitar. He looks like the kid of the party who has been dragged out of bed and brought downstairs to entertain the family friends. As I watch him, I can’t help but contemplate his trajectory since I last saw him.
His song "Oxygen" has sent him flying from continent to continent, into the stratosphere, (where he met Richard Branson’s cosmic team), so fast and so high that I suddenly worry he might not land back alive.
The problem with "Oxygen" is that it makes everyone instantly aware of how rarefied our world is : the need for the values it represents is infinite, and because there are so few such authentic demonstrations around, the song becomes priceless. Courted by the music industry, shaking more hands than he can handle, Willy Mason boldly marches on, on his way to become the real life hero of a modern fable : the boy who wanted to be "cooler than TV" and ended up on it.

Tonight however we are still light years away from the cold motions of television. "Gotta keep moving", a new song from his first LP "Where the humans Eat" is an impressive demonstration of his guitar technique, supporting a voice which intense touring has made gain in depth and bite. Less than a minute into the song and a hush has fallen on the crowd, creating one of those rare palpable silences. He doesn’t play with it though : the informality of the song transitions confirms the shared belief that he is an unpretentious kid. He invites people to rock to "So long", which puzzles the ultra urban audience, who more readily associates acoustic guitar to birds in the trees and splashing in the streams than to headbanging.

His lyrical talent is evident, however one can’t help but want him to part from the protest song tradition with references to ecological catastrophes, dying free spirits and cynical mercantilism, to move to the paradoxically more universal subject of the self. For Mason never serves his values better than when he sings in the first person, expressing universal hopes and fears through unpretentious and unforgiving observation.
With the brilliant "Hard hand to hold" and a shortened version of "Oxygen" for the encore, the kid that speaketh the truth leaves us and goes to bed to catch up with his rocket lag.

Adem

When I come back from my teabreak, Adem is already on stage. Tonight’s atmosphere owes everything to Adem’s aesthetics and recent obsession with the little things that make home what it is. Anybody who had a look at the delightful design of his website and videos will have realised how it is recreated at the Conway Hall.
The stage looks like a mini puppet theatre, where the musician toys suddenly come to life in the absence of their owners. Adem is the old teddy, worn at the seams. He seems to naturally own the place, making introductions and ensuring everybody make themselves comfortable. When it is his turn to play, he decides to surround himself with the Playmobiles, undoubtedly because they are the ones that come with the most accessories : mini harp, maracas, xylophone, tambourine, congas, banjo, rattles, bells... For "These are your friends", the mini drum-sticks are ceremonially brought out, and their tiny clinking noise punctuates the song which builds up to a friendship mantra finale "everybody needs some help sometimes".
"Ringing in my ears" and the bare "There will always be", (a sistersong to Björk’s "Unravel") close the set, and Adem and his band leave the stage to give centerstage to the mysterious & majestic harp we all have been staring at for the past few hours.

Joanna Newsom

The harp has long been associated to heavenly creatures who strum their instrument to comfort tired souls and please the Lord. Joanna Newsom’s entrance perfectly illustrates this ideal : with pearls and curls and a nightsky dress, she freshly escaped from a secret Rossetti painting. Adjusting the folds of her dress and leaning against her instrument, she breathes in and...

However much people have written about her voice, nothing can quite prepare you for it. Her voice is scary, her voice is mad : it oscillates between that of a three-year-old spoilt girl and a ninety-two-year-old raving witch, a wet wild cat, Judge Doom out of his cartoon, a voice from a forgotten past, a forgotten planet. It is at first alienating. I remember wondering whether it was an affectation, but soon realised that the idea was so incongruous it was bound to be improbable. For the first time in my life, I had to work out what I made of it : I usually fall in love with voices at first listen, not by force of habit. But something kept me wanting to understand this vocal accent, as it were a new kind of musical semantics, because I was guessing that its unfamiliar tones would depict a story I longed to hear. Seeing Joanna Newsom live finally gives me the opportunity to hear the fairytale.

We sail away with “Bridges and Balloons”, while she extracts a million droplets from the strings of her harp. With “Book of right on”, she uses her instrument as if it were a double-bass, each tap cushioning the syllables that fall out of her mouth like frogs and diamonds. “Sadie” emerges as the most heartfelt song, a long complaint that the audience listens to holding its breath, for fear that the shy apparition disappears altogether (“And all that I’ve got, and all that I need, I tie in a knot, that I lay at your feet, I have not forgot, but a silence crept over me”). “What we have known” from the sold-out EP “Yarn and Glue” equally engulfs us in endless melancholy.
Time is suspended and eternity doesn’t seem quite long enough. When she asks after while in a timid voice “how long have I got ?”, a blissful admirer sums up the general consensus by replying “Ages !”. The set however soon draws to a close, and she finishes with “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” : “I do as I please, now I’m on my knees, [...], clam, crab, cockle, cowrie ; will you just look at me ?”. We sure will.

(Smog)

In true (Smog) fashion, (Smog) a.k.a. Bill Callahan appears late on a bare and empty stage, as if his performance could only take place once he is certain the show is truly over. We almost expect to see a cleaner appear and mumble over with a broom. With his dark suit, cavernous voice and acoustic guitar held up high like a weapon, he is the perfect counterpoint to Newsom’s angelic presence. And if the angel was beautiful, god is the devil sexy !

(Smog) had been recommended to me with all the admiration and enthusiasm necessary to make me feel a total imbecile. I now admit I have blissfully ignored Smog (and (Smog) !) for the best of his twelve years of recording career. Half way through the first song and I acknowledge the immensity of my ignorance.

His poetic might is such that I am instantly under the spell and transported to a world filled with pugnacious love (“bury me in stone and I will quake, bury me in fire and I will phoenix”), disillusionment (“I’ve taken the edge off so many times I’m round”), marital advice (“Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife, [...] blow kisses to my grieving brothers”) and loss (“this is no place for a memory or a father to die”).

I am also made to realise that he is such a prolific artist, that when he turns to the crowd for requests, rather than hearing the usual unanimous howl “SONG X !!” (to be understood as “songX-that’s-the-only-song-we-know/we-got-the-single”), it feels as if each individual of the crowd is suddenly possessed by spirits with different agendas and the clamour that emerges suddenly makes Conway Hall sound like the tower of Babel : “I am Star Wars !” “bathysphere !” “I break horses !” “Spread your bloody wings !” “Blood red bird” “Red Apple !” “Hangman Blues !” etc, etc, etc... The clamour swells, dies, and swells again, and (Smog) waits with an imperceptible smile.

The temptation to quote Bill Callahan’s lyrics is not only irresistible, but also inevitable : when sung, his words gain a unique dimension, giving poetry a new flow, unearthing hidden memories in their wake, and carrying people and emotions like dead branches to the delta.

Long after (Smog) has left the stage and everybody’s gone home, there is one song that keeps haunting me : you’d kill to claim authorship of a song like that. And in a macabre twist you might even decide to dress sexy at its real author’s funeral (his name was already in brackets anyway you say to the judge) :

“Flying alone

Were stars”