LIVE: Beans On Toast & Will Varley – Rockwood Music Hall, NYC 12.10.16

Home is a funny thing. It can transcend the physical, or be so rooted in location and proximity that it is almost inescapable. On Wednesday night, Beans On Toast and Will Varley brought a taste of home to, well, my home. In the tiny stage one area of Rockwood Music Hall in the Lower East Side (my birth place), the two English folk musicians filled the room with their equally unique, disparate, and yet complimentary sounds. It was a breath of fresh English air (which I have adopted as the one that fills my lungs) in the cool October New York City evening.

With a voice that soon stopped all the chatter, Will Varley had no problem taking control of the room. His easy flowing chit-chat, from mid-song-interludes asking us for a US store to substitute for Tesco in ‘Weddings And Wars’, to passing a five dollar note through the crowd in exchange for a lager with a lime in it, brought the audience even closer. It was as if we were in his living room – sitting around listening to him jam.

The hint of rawness in his honeyed vocals prevents his lyrics from slipping into the dreary. ‘King For A King’ was both a warning and a lament, and despite the chuckles that we all shared when he said the word “tits”, the half-humming-half-silence he inspired cast a tenuous comfort in the crowd. ‘Talking Cat Blues’, for which I spontaneously provided the cat noises, gave the audience space to laugh amidst the more pensive moments. When Will lost his gaze on nothing and said “sorry, was just thinking about my girlfriend. I haven’t seen her in a while”, I like to think we were all reminded of loved ones we hadn’t seen. He even graced us with the beautifully melancholy ‘One Last Look At The View’ from his upcoming Kingsdown Sundown. It was a too short glimpse at Varley’s musical growth and whet the appetite perfectly for the album’s release.

Where Varley gives the audience a space for sound-tracked self-examination, Beans On Toast’s tongue-in-cheek-cum-abrasive-honesty was both a culture shock and yet a perfect bookend. Beans’ music is very England-centric – for someone who has adopted the UK as a second home, his references to UK politicians like Michael Gove make sense, and I understand the ubiquity of his musical moniker. He gave the audience an analogy for himself: “I’m like ‘Hot Dog from New Jersey’” he explained of both his name and his native Essex. The audience loved it – but probably didn’t need it. Because when he played, the audience was singing along.

Like Varley, Beans makes the stage his home and invites us into it. The audience is part of the performance, no less for our enthusiastic sing-along in ‘Sold Out Show’ or our attempts at finding an American translation for ‘Spanner In The Works’, but because his music is live memoir. ‘2016’ is a perfect anthem for where both countries are politically, and to balance out the depressing reality of it, Beans crafted a brand new song, ‘Sex On A Wednesday’ right there on the spot. It is this balance he strikes well.

In the midst of all the “terror, terror, terrorism”, Beans gives joy. ‘We Made It To The Waterfall’ is a love song that anyone can relate to – it’s an achievable goal that, despite the chaos, we can reach. As he played, we all listened carefully, for sounds of ourselves in his words. We were rescued from the precipice with a naïve hope that is both relatable and endearing. His unrefined style lends itself perfectly to his pithy lyrics. He hedges his musical bets between apathy and activism – I love to eat meat but I have to wonder, where are all those chicken farms? His own ambivalence allows us to leave the gig not feeling guilty for our sins, but instead wanting to do our bit to make a difference however we can.

Will Varley and Beans On Toast are each a pleasure to watch on their own, but side-by-side they are a combination one might not expect to work, but falls in love with. Playing live, they turned a simple, crowded bar on the lower east side into a home for people who love music, who agonise about the state of the world, but still want to sing about the people we love and the small, wonderful things. I could have watched them both all over again.

Special shout out to early opening acts: Shelby Lanterman (never seen such a powerful voice come out of such a tiny human, with ’60s inspired lyricism) and Nell Maynard (wise-beyond-her-years words and a voice full of comfort).

Gabriella Geisinger

Gabriella Geisinger
Gabriella M Geisinger is a twenty-seven year old freelance writer from New York City. She has her M.A. in Creative Writing: Narrative Nonfiction from City University London, and lives between the two cities. She uses words like bricks, building houses that keep you safe for a time.