Jay Jay Pistolet, Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth

A swift set from Jay Jay Pistolet was the warm up for Laura Marling tonight. The solo singer-songwriter only played five or six songs but still managed to keep the slightly-rowdy crowd quiet for a few of them. Through a vintage microphone (taped hurriedly to the microphone stand five minutes before) his vocals sounded straight out of a post-war vinyl recording, and the songs from his Happy Birthday You EP really captured my imagination on fireworks night.
The funny thing is that there was nothing new or even fresh about his approach to singing, or even his songs, but that does not necessarily mean it was poor or unimaginative. He has clearly borrowed the best parts from a lot of his folk peers, but moulded them into his own style, and I was left thinking ‘this bloke has something rather unique and special’. This snippet of a set was just the injection of acoustic-folk ballads I needed to get me into the mood for the main event.
JJP has an array of endearing onstage habits. In between songs he comes across so painfully shy that it could be confused with a form of autism or mental problem. His disheveled and shy demeanor caught the eye of most around me, and for someone who was relatively unknown to most of us there; he achieved a collective top-marks score!