Jenny Don’t & The Spurs
28th October 2023
Meeanee Memorial Hall, Napier, New Zealand.
Review by Rob Harbers, photography by Andrew Caldwell.
With a level of volume and speed rarely encountered in the context of the Small Hall Sessions, Jenny Don’t and the Spurs are rip-roaring their way through some of Hawkes Bay’s community hubs. If a train whistle can be thought of as one of the enduring motifs of country music, this crew have taken over the iron horse in question and fuelled it with nitrous, coming on like a hurricane!
The band performed in Aotearoa a year or two back on the standard Auckland+ circuit, but were intrigued enough by what they encountered to want to come back for a longer visit. To their credit, they’re now following through on that, performing over a dozen gigs across the motu in this run, one which will see them having visited 6 countries before it’s all over. Thusly have they and the Small Hall Sessions been fortuitous enough to encounter each other. As Jenny said during a rare ad-lib, people outside the big cities want to see music too! And what better way to achieve that than to hitch their wagon to the Sessions?
From the first note played, it was obvious that here’s a band who take no prisoners. Their amped-up and cranked-up interpretation of Country and (North) Western on speed explains how they came to drink Jamie out of lager – such exuberance takes a lot of fuelling, and no powerful engine can run for too long without lubrication!
I’m not going to try and do any kind of song-by-song analysis here (that’s why we show you the setlist, after all!), such was the breakneck speed at which they arrived – I suspect that this set may also have broken SHS records for the number of songs that were packed in. Jenny is at the centre of the action, as implied by the name, on vocals and guitar, backed by the hard-driving rhythm section of her husband Kelly Halliburton on bass and drummer Buddy Weeks, fitting in perfectly after only having been on board for just under a year. Above it all lead guitarist Christopher March maintains a constant stream of notes that are nothing but pure country, just at Adderall speed!
This is a true good-time experience, one that tempted a few souls to dance (another comparative SHS rarity). Their business card describes them as Country, Garage and Western, which is an accurate summary, as they meld a beautifully dirty noise sensibility in to the Country genre, while at the same time leaving their trail obvious. An experience that is retro at its core, not to imply any kind of datedness about it – there’s enough classic country for older ears, noise for the middle generation and outright speed to appeal to anybody with the ears to hear!
But enough of this feeble attempt at putting this all in to words, so here’s the takeaway: not just both types of music, but all three: Country, Noisy, and Fast! One more opportunity to catch them at a Session, in Onga-Onga tonight, and then two more dates before zipping off to Asian climes. Let’s pack out the last three shows of this tour, and show them how much we want them to come back!
Were you there at the Meeanee Memorial Hall for this intimate gig? Or have you seen Jenny Don’t & The Spurs perform live somewhere else before? Tell us about it in the comments below!
Setlist:
Note: Ambient Light was provided passes to review and photograph this concert. As always, this has not influenced the review in any way and the opinions expressed are those of Ambient Light’s only.
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