Johnny Flynn – Manchester Deaf Institute (October 2009)

Hazel Davis accidentally falls for a posh lad

Johnny Flynn was the third performer I’d seen last week apologising for a sore throat/cold/strained voice. Luckily (for us, not him), Flynn’s main appeal is his deliciously creaky voice so his ailment only added to the experience.

For one who has spent the last year in rhapsodies over Flynn’s stunning debut album A Larum, hawking it round my friends, soundtracking entire holidays with it, quoting sage lines from it, the real-life entity is something of a shock. A diffident, very young-looking Prince Harry figure (and didn’t the girls on the front row know it), Flynn is about as posh as you can get without actually being royalty. But his songs are earthy old-before-his-age tales of priests, rivers and Hong Kong cemeteries.

Half the audience had clearly turned up at Manchester’s Deaf Institute to catch one of Flynn’s well-nourished smiles and there was much simpering and throwing of hats on stage. This was maybe one of the reasons that (at least at the back) there was an ambivalent response to the fantastic support act Anna Calvi, a sort of brooding female Roy-Orbison-meets-Velvet-Underground act of mesmeric David Lynch proportions. I adored it but the audience were restless and couldn’t wait for Flynn to arrive.

He didn’t disappoint, despite apologizing for everything, from his voice to tuning to not wanting to wear the hat (he did – for a bit). Flynn’s distinctive tones felled the crowd into awestruck silence as he creaked through some new tracks from his EP, Sweet William, and the (already) classics, a mesmerizing Brown Trout Blues, The Box and – everyone’s favourite – the stunning The Wrote And The Writ, which elicited big cheers. By Tickle Me Pink his voice was starting to really crack. It sounded good but in a painful way.

Flynn’s delivery – it was just him and the guitar, though he promised a return in Spring with his full band – outlined just how perfectly Dylanesque his songs are. New takes on numbers such as Leftovers demonstrated how intertwined he is with them and the lack of instrumentation, rather than showed up flaws, showed up his extraordinary phrasing.

He encored with Leftovers, at the request of a poor lovestruck loon at the front, after his only concession to rock-stardom, a rubbish story about being breathalised because he’d forgotten to turn the lights on in his car. Bless his good-at-making-rafts-venison-and-Brown-Windsor-soup heart.

Hazel Davis