The smell of Old Holborn is thick in the air and there's 10 yards of nodding bald pates in front of the stage. No one could accuse the Walkabouts of having a teenage audience, though by the look of them, some of their fans have got teenage children.
A gothic, country-rock lullaby called Desert Skies is oozing from the black-clad band and a bittersweet, pre-dawn, mid-hangover and resolutely west coast mood is settling comfortably over a crowd who have clearly come here to wallow. The Walkabouts were formed in Seattle in 1984 when Chris Eckman, strumming Buzzcocks songs on his electric guitar, met folkie Carla Torgerson, who played acoustic. In the 10 albums they've released since, they've worked with Natalie Merchant, Brian Eno and REM's Peter Buck, and recorded for Sub Pop, the defining record label of grunge. Their sound is low-key, bleary-eyed, and gently emotional - country rock and blues that wears black jeans and hangs out in Seattle coffee bars, yet played with a passion that is bewitching. The Walkabouts create minor chord moods that envelope the Camden Underworld like a fog, and by their third track, the eerie, twanging Crime Story, the audience are helplessly, silently rapt.
Someone has hung ornate paper stars over the stage, a reference to their impressively doomy latest album Trail Of Stars, being showcased tonight. The intense-looking couple leaning on the pillar are entranced: the guy never stops stroking his dark-bobbed girlfriend's shoulders; her wide eyes never leave the stage. Carla invests the bluesy guitars of Til I Reach You, also from Trail Of Stars, with a throaty charm and two sets of keyboards soar. Wearing a long black skirt, she looks more like an art teacher than a rock star. Blonde hair hangs over one side of Eckman's Nordic face. The keyboard player is wearing a pork pie hat, made of blue straw. The bassist, jerking awkwardly, looks like a maths teacher in mufti.
As another anguished chorus shudders to a close, the balding, bespectacled guy beside me rocks backwards and forwards like a baby. Like their audience, the Walkabouts are refreshingly uncool. They don't say much. They don't change mood much. They don't look like much. But there is a humanity and unaffected grace to their music that shines against the obsessive, shiny cool of modern pop.
***** Unmissable
**** Recommended
*** Enjoyable
** Mediocre
* Terrible
