The Kitchen Garden Café in King’s Heath, Birmingham, makes you glad people still believe in putting good music in small rooms. Attached to a restaurant and garden centre by day, it becomes an intimate music venue by night, with fairy lights, wooden chairs and the kind of closeness that makes performers feel like exceptionally talented guests who have wandered into the living room you wish you had. Manager Brett has built a reputation for an eclectic programme of folk, country and indie and certainly has an ear for something special. On Thursday 24th September, this mainstay of the Midlands Americana circuit provided the perfect setting for an artist who is difficult to categorise.
The Canadian Petunia stepped out of a sepia photograph and onto the stage: hand-built Art & Lutherie guitar from his homeland, rust-coloured waistcoat, dark denim, tan Oxfords with cheerfully striped socks and a cream cowboy hat with a feather tucked into it, dark hair slicked underneath.
Petunia’s voice sounded as though it had travelled through several decades and across the plains to make it to Birmingham. He brought the yodel of Jimmie Rodgers, the country ache of Hank Williams, the gravel of Tom Waits and something of the theatrical sweep of Roy Orbison, all with an avant-garde punk twist. Comparisons, however, miss the point.
Petunia’s relationship with time is fascinating. He has been accused, he told us, of being trapped in the past. Naturally, his response has been both to release the album I Live in the Past and to write avant-garde songs which give modern takes on timeless themes. In my view, he is an artist who has carefully collected antique fragments of musical genres to create something completely and electrically in the present. He rummages around in the musical history jumble and puts together a thoughtful and note-perfect new iteration. He can move from a 1920s song to a new composition, classic country to jug band music, tin pan alley to punk rock, without the transitions ever feeling anything but brilliant.
Petunia opened with Bicycle Song, its “flower flakes falling in the lamplight on the street” immediately establishing a songwriter with a wonderfully curious imagination able to conjure exceptional imagery. Living in Vancouver, he asked whether we rode bicycles in the rain, then in the snow, playfully describing cycling in the snow as “a little like surfing”. This was our introduction to Petunia’s particular world: part country music revivalist, part vaudevillian, part historian, part storyteller and part eccentric inventor, with the whole impression more than the mechanical sum of its parts. And what a world it was. Petunia wore around his neck a contraption he had made from a wire coat hanger, he said with tongue in cheek, was from 1927, a kazoo and a bicycle bell, held together with duct tape. And behold, the brilliant “kazoo-sa-phone”.
Selecting from his eclectic back catalogue with his band The Vipers, Cold Heartbreaker was followed by his tribute to Roy Orbison, Burnt Love Letters, a song that gave us a piece of Petunia wisdom: that there are two kinds of people: those who keep their love letters safely in a cupboard and those who “just want to burn them”.
Riffing on another formative influence, Petunia performed the Hank Williams classic, Lovesick Blues. Of course, we were all celebrating Hank’s 103rd birthday week, but it was clear he was keen to avoid simply giving us another imitation. Instead, he traced the song further back, explaining its history and recommending that we look Emmett Miller up afterwards. Mercy brought us dark and moody ragtime twang with a line that suggests, “If Tom Waits could yodel/ And I’ll bet that he can,” offering a pretty accurate way of describing Petunia’s voice.
A Jimmie Rodgers song rounded off the first half of the evening, and it felt as though the humming, yodelling heir to the Singing Brakeman himself had wandered into the room.
The second half shone a light on the raw underground heart of Petunia’s lyrics, politically conscious and darkly poetic. Petunia provided the surreal image, “I sprinkle my horse’s mane with gopher dust.” He asked us, “Why the heck would you do that?” and took us through Crazy Horse’s vision of a spotted horse with a lightning bolt on its back, protected from bullets by gopher dust before he led the Sioux into battle, “because gophers know how to hide”. He told it with such warmth and lightness of touch that the room smiled, but the story carried the weight of generations.
Towards the end of the gig, he offered to teach Birmingham how to two-step. The introverted Thursday-night Kitchen Garden Café audience remained firmly seated. However, we were perfectly willing to sing, especially when Petunia looked at his watch and declared it “harmony o’clock” – the point when people have drunk enough beer to join in, but not so much that we wouldn’t want to hear them if they did.
A particular highlight was I’m Shakin, originally written by Little Willie John, later recorded by The Blasters and The White Stripes. Petunia’s version was bluesy, restless, and entirely his own. And this was the pattern of the whole evening. Nothing stayed where you expected it to, with a punk, avant-garde swirl of trad americana. Country became blues. Blues became rock ‘n’ roll. A 1930s song became a Petunia song. A coat hanger became an instrument. A bicycle bell became part of a one-man band. A cowboy story became a meditation on history. A joke became a song about grief. Even his voice refused to stay in one place.
The audience would not let him leave, and one encore became four. Petunia self-deprecatingly admitted that he had missed quite a few songs anyway because he had spent so much time “yammering”. A particular highlight from this enigmatic raconteur was when he told us about performing on a hay wagon in a pick-your-own pumpkin patch, doing 20 sets a day for kids on field trips, 22 days in a row. Understandably, he had begun to go slightly stir crazy, and channelled this into the furiously upbeat, riotous rockabilly number, Maybe Baby Amy about the girl who drove the tractor.
The evening ended with an uproarious Petunia styling of Have You Heard The News?, a full-speed rock ‘n’ roll number that seemed a fitting conclusion to a night that had refused to sit still musically.
Steeped in a profound understanding of Americana music and heritage, this is a performer who knows which rules to break to reach an exciting new sound. The Spring tour with The Vipers can’t come soon enough.
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