People *do* Smile More...

Thursday night found us at the beatiful Roundhouse venue in London's Camden Town to spend a couple of hours in the company of Newton Faulkner.

Looking like a refugee from The Levellers with his waist length dreadlocks and goatee beard, Faulkner is one of the latest crop of singer-songwriters, but what sets him aside from the Jack Johnsons of this world, who I also like very much, is the way that he plays his acoustic guitar.

Not only does he play it the conventional way with a mastery that suggests he's been playing guitars for as long as he could hold them, but he also uses the fingers and palm of his right hand to beat out a rhythm to accompany himself.

This technique is best illustrated on his inspired covered of Massive Attack's Teardrop, which despite the original being such an iconic song, Faulkner has made his own in much the same way that Johnny Cash made Nine Inch Nails' Hurt his own, even prompting an impressed Trent Reznor to declare "It's not my song any more."

Faulkner's album Hand Built By Robots is packed to the gills with catchy pop songs (though whether he'd agree with the 'pop' label is another matter) and so I was looking forward to being entertained for an hour and a half purely on the strength of the material.

However, Faulkner's trump card is his stage presence and, more importantly, his humour. I can't remember the last time I've laughed so much at a gig, for the right reasons, anyway. Cracking jokes at his own expense and coming out with one liners that some professional comedians would kill for, he had the audience eating out of his hand mere moments after taking the stage.

He dropped Teardrop into the set about two-thirds of the way through, and for me I thought that would be the highlight of the set, but his master stroke came with his final song, another cover, that as a veteran gig goer of some twenty-odd years had me as impressed as I ever remember being.

Telling us that he had been tinkering with another cover, he launched into a version of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody using just his voice and his unique guitar playing style. The audience went into rapture, singing along while simultaneously looking on wide-eyed as he again made the song his own, and ending the gig on the highest note that I've ever know a show to conclude on.

We laughed, we sang, and we witnessed the culmination of the first year of what I'm convinced will be a long and successful career.

Teardrop aside, one of Faulkner's best known songs is called People Should Smile More, and for the ninety minutes he was on stage we did. A lot more.