Ryan Adams makes friends with his sublime, self-indulgent apology tour
Sat in semi-darkness, lit only by antique table lamps dotted around the stage illuminating his guitar nook, piano and a coat stand for his chunky-knit sweater, Ryan Adams clearly needed to feel amongst friends. For this Americana tear-jerker’s first UK show in six years Newcastle’s City Hall became an intimate twilight acoustic session in the den; a broken alt-country deadbeat trying to convince a world that once loved him to give him another chance.
Since seven women accused him of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct in 2019 (the FBI found no criminal wrongdoing; the moral prosecution’s case is ongoing), Adams’ coping mechanism was music. Shunned by the industry and self-declared “broke”, he self-released eight records since 2020 ranging from double albums of heartbreak country or Eighties drivetime rock to track-by-track covers of classic Springsteen and Dylan records.
In Newcastle, too, songs flooded out. Over three solo hours, darting between acoustic and piano, he stripped his catalogue to its bare, haunting fabric, deep-woven with contrition. “Don’t say sorry,” he told one pint-laden late-comer, “all my songs are sorry.”
By turns tormented (Everybody Knows), fragile (Firecracker) and impassioned (Ashes & Fire), his porch-swing alt-country was undeniably affecting, particularly when preluded with a dash of raconteur. A story about spending five days on drugs in an LA tiki bar instead of Christmas with his actress girlfriend made La Cienega Just Smiled (“the fourth best song about Winona Ryder”) sound as tender as a California comedown.
As he gradually relaxed, Adams’ clunky wit loosened. The stage, he explained, “looks like I’ve robbed some grandma’s house” because the “Frank Sinatra streetlamps” he’d requested had turned up the size of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge. But, bewildered by encouraging heckles, it became clear that he can’t speak Geordie. One mis-heard shout prompted him to improvise a genuinely hilarious song entitled Heater for Easter on the spot: “I’m kind of an asshole, but I’m in Newcastle”.
Another balcony wag referenced Dylan in 1965, although a Judas-like change of pace might have stopped the second set – as it reached a plaintive piano rendition of Smokey Robison’s The Tracks of My Tears – feeling like the acoustic guy at the sleepover going on too long.
“Thank you for sitting through so much miserable music,” Adams muttered ahead of a bewitching When the Stars Go Blue and his “ultimate love song to drugs” Prisoner, prefaced with a confessional speech about relapsing into alcohol and depression following the death of his brother Chris in 2017. Reverent, Newcastle welcomed him back; others may baulk at a cap-clutching show seven parts sublime, three parts self-indulgence.
Touring the UK until April 19. See ryanadamsofficial.com/tour
