Playing support to Super Furry Animals vocalist Gruff Rhys can’t be an easy gig to agree to, writes Sara Royle.
It would have been understandable if She Makes War had been apprehensive before taking the Crown Hotel ballroom stage.
If she was, it certainly didn’t show as she entered the room in a metallic two-piece and with glitter war paint under her eyes.
Playing a set that utilised the ukulele, a loop pedal, and a megaphone, Laura Kidd was far from a receding wallflower.
Telling us that she was going to play us ‘songs about [her] bad year’, Kidd’s performance was defiant yet, in parts, morose.
On the surface it would be easy to see Kidd as twee or quirky and nothing more – but listen to her lyrics and you’ll realise you’re much mistaken.
The content ranges from Kidd being brutally honest about the end of relationships (‘I’d like to delete myself’), to singing of her father’s illness (‘please do not leave me yet’).
Even when it isn’t romantic, there is heartbreak (‘I decided to write a song that wasn’t just about boys because that’s boring’) in so much of the set.
Alongside the heartache, there was theatricality with Kidd leaving the stage to walk amongst us with her megaphone.
By the time she’d finished, I felt like I’d found a new favourite musician. A recurring theme at the Words and Music Festival, it seems.
As we waited for Gruff Rhys, the room filled up until we were all sufficiently acquainted with the people next to us and regretting our winter appropriate outfits.
What followed was around 90 minutes of ludicrousness, punctured by achingly beautiful melodies.
Rhys tells the tale of John Evans, an 18th century Welsh explorer who seeks the rumoured Welsh Indians in America.
To do this, Rhys uses an advanced multimedia set up – mostly consisting of projected pictures and a lot of zooming.
Most impressively, he also has his very own John Evans doll, which serves to really bring the tale to life.
Despite the specific story that Rhys is telling and the big laughs that punctuate the music, most of the lyrics are opaque, offering listeners the chance to appropriate them.
It’s a tale of grand narratives, identity, hopeless ambition and, ultimately, of loss.
A mad, but strangely heroic, tale of a little known Welsh farmhand that Rhys told to an enthralled Nantwich crowd.
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