Danny and the Champions of the World: North Wall (From The Oxford Times)

Danny and the Champions of the World: North Wall

3:53pm Wednesday 14th April 2010 in

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Tonight’s gig has been the centrepiece of Oxfringe 2010. Curated by Bob Harris, of Old Grey Whistle Test fame, music patron of the festival, the evening consists of a set from the Mojo Pins (a new band managed by Harris’s son Miles), a lengthy Q&A with Harris and a headline show from Danny and the Champions of the World.

This is the Mojo Pins’ first show and unfortunately it’s come far, far too soon. The vocals are muddy, the songs go nowhere and the only discernable influence is mid- nineties wasters Cast. There’s no point writing the band off yet, but it’s not a promising start.

Bob Harris’s Q&A, on the other hand is wonderful. Harris has clearly had a life blessed with extraordinary experiences and he shares many of them with the North Wall crowd, with the audience’s smiles getting wider the more he talks. A terrific asset to Oxfringe, you get the feeling he’s got enough good stories to do this every year.

After the Q&A, there’s so much goodwill in the room, DCOTW can’t help but play a blinder. As close as Oxford’s music scene gets to super group, the band’s line-up includes Truck Festival founders Robin and Joe Bennett and, on various occasions, Fionn Regan and Romeo Stoddart, singer in the Magic Numbers. Fronted by lynchpin Danny Wilson, the band’s style is suited to a line- up that’s never the same twice. Their music is freewheeling and can seemingly never have too many instruments on any given song. Their sound, in particular Restless Feet, Henry the Van and Follow the River, seems to feature the whole great American songbook, both road-weary and tender, at once in love with their surroundings and wanting to jump on the bus and get the hell out of town. It would have been difficult to fail in these circumstances, but DCOTW’s set would have been terrific anyway.

A wonderful evening, hopefully the first of many like it.