Jimmy Webb – A Secular Religious Experience

In the pantheon of great London concert halls, Cadogan Hall slips right in there between the Royal Albert Hall and the Festival Hall, a 950-seat capacity concert arena just the shortest of short strolls from the rush of Sloane Square. Home to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it can often feel like a church.

    Which is certainly what it felt like last Friday. That was when me and half a dozen friends saw our first significant concert since we all emerged from lockdown, a rare visit to these shores from the great American singer-songwriter, Jimmy Webb. I’ve seen Jimmy perform all over the world – the first date I had with the woman who would become my wife was at one of Jimmy’s concerts at the Café Royal - and yet I can unequivocally say that last week’s performance in Chelsea was the very best I’ve witnessed by the man. At the tender age of 75, he not only continues to be a gifted raconteur (with many stories I hadn’t heard before), his singing and piano playing seem to have actually benefitted from the enforced isolation of the last two years.

    God knows how.

    His melancholy melodies have often seemed like hymns – to my ears, even “Up, Up and Away” has an odd, wistful air about it – and here, on a stage bathed in a Jubilee-appropriate royal purple light, “Didn’t We”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston” and “The Highwayman” sounded almost holy.

    You could even call it communion.

    Nowadays, most social events are scanned by their audience for relevant passages suitable for social media. Instagram is my digital drug of choice, and having scanned the half a dozen short films I’d recorded during the gig, there was only one thing I was ever going to post. My 59-second clip of Jimmy pounding through one of the instrumental sections of “MacArthur Park” was something of a revelation. He must have played this damn song hundreds – possibly even thousands – of times, and yet it was as if he were coming to it for the first time, using the keys to express all the joy and hurt contained in that magnificent creation. As he banged away, his arms flailing in front of him, it could have been an exorcism.  

   I went to see “Jimmy Webb” (the nickname Richard Harris gave him, back when he was recording “MacArthur Park”, perhaps thinking that using a mere Christian name was a tad too inconsequential) with my oldest friend, a famous singer I’ve known since I was 17, and she, like me, almost had tears in her eyes. She too, had seen Jimmy perform many times down through the ages, and she thought the man she saw at Cadogan he was a man reborn.

    “Jimmy Webb”, he’ll come back again, and again…
And again and again and again and again.

Dylan Jones, author of The Wichita Lineman