Will Varley - Through The Lowlands (Live at The Lighthouse, Deal, December 2022) (2023)

Recorded in 2022, Will Varley‘s ‘Through The Lowlands‘ is a live showcase of two decades worth of material that began back when he left school and, with the Hatton Brothers as his rhythm section, began playing South London’s open mics and insalubrious dives. Today, the Hattons own and run The Lighthouse in Varley’s native Kent, where the show was recorded, featuring themselves alongside Duncan McKay on trumpet, keyboardist Tom Farrer and local pedal steel hero Dave Kirk. Keeping rehearsals to a minimum, the resulting sound is raw and urgent, the band often finding their way through the material as they were playing it.

I don’t know if the tracks appear in the order they were played live, but if so, rather than come out blazing, he kicks off in a slow, ruminative manner with Newborn from his 2011 debut Advert Postcards, which also provides the source of the second track, picking up the tempo with the scuffed shuffle of I Still Think of You Sometimes.

Fast forwarding to 2021’s The Hole Around My Head, he taps into the Dylan-inspired masterpiece that is Her Own Private Universe, the live treatment deepening the song’s emotional resonances. Kingsdown Sundown from 2016 provides almost a third of the setlist, the first coming with the Velvets-like bassline of Let Your Guard Down and its optimistic message about letting love in, the two other selections being, first, the slow walking, melancholic February Snow and its depiction of a winter funeral, expanding the original’s simple acoustic guitar to embrace piano-backed gospel hues as the vocals soar with emotion and a mournful harmonica solo proves an inspired touch. The third, the penultimate track, the measured waltzing One Last Look At The View, retains the simple stripped-back guitar but builds up the piano arrangement as he muses on mortality and one final dawn.

There’s nothing from Spirit of Minnie, but you get treated to a brand new, as yet otherwise unrecorded number likely to be on the next album. Showcasing McKay’s blistering trumpet, Something Eating Away At Us is a slow, bluesy groove that recalls the pace of Something Is Breaking on Kingsdown Sundown as he digs into his earthier, funkier Dylan influences with snarled lyrics couched in collapsing state of the world eco-social commentary, offset with pedal steel and an observation that “music is made of stars”.

Completing the show, there’s one each from As The Crow Flies and Postcards From Ursa Major, the former represented by a very different reading of Until The Grass Gets Greener, transforming from a spare fingerpicked 60s folk troubadour setting to a driving, piano and snares-led led number of a more Springsteen meets Jackie Levin persuasion. Then …Postcards yields The Question of Passing Time, another song about growing older which, retaining the original’s cosmic ambience, both extends the song by almost a minute and brings extra muscle to the instrumentation with the drums, piano and trumpet, bringing it to a crescendo rather than a fade. In a way, that album also serves as an impetus to the final track as, on From Halcyon, he references someone singing the folk traditional drowned love lament Lowlands Away, which he indeed does here to bring things to a sterling arm-swaying, harmonica-blowing, keys-trilling, trumpet aching slow shanty conclusion to send you home with the stars shining in your head.

Quite why Varley has yet to achieve the status where he’s playing stadiums rather than clubs and pubs is a mystery. Still, this album is a forceful reminder of the sort of power he brings to his performances, whatever the size of the stage.