KEEP FALLING IN AND OUT OF LOVE...

I fell in love in the summer of '99. It was a beautiful day. The sun shone, no doubt the birds sang but I couldn’t hear them as I was inside a car travelling at fifty or so mph around the North Circular. I was bored with the radio. I decided to stop at Brent Cross Shopping Centre to buy a new CD. I just didn’t know what.

This was the first and the only time I’ve ever bought music having had no prior acquaintanceship with the artist. It was a gamble, but the copy of Uncut magazine I leafed through over a coffee in Fenwicks said the album, this ‘first’ album by a young singer who’d chosen to turn her back on the Nashville machine and make her own music her own way, was worthy of five stars.

This isn't it. 

Walked over to HMV. Didn’t expect to see her there. But there she was, blonde hair flying up and around a surly-looking face, all of it framed by a lust-red background. Scrawled across it, her statement of intent: I Am Shelby Lynne.

What the hell. Gamble a tenner. Never heard of her, never heard a note of her music. Didn’t even like country.

Got back to the car, put the disc in just as I was heading down the on-ramp. As the car hit that last stretch of three-lane before the tailbacks started, there was a sound like a drummer falling downstairs with his full kit, a sound that first made me laugh for half a second, then think I’d made a terrible mistake. But then, oh but then, she started to sing…

Since then, I’ve bought every record she’s made. The ill-advised we’re-gonna-make-you-the-new-Dusty Springfield Love, Shelby (where she first started to wear as little as possible on the album sleeve, an image continued retroactively on the re-issued I Am.. a few years later);

the stripped-down Identity Crisis where she shrank to microscopic size using her ex-husband’s scientific devices then murdered her best friend by literally stamping on her brain… No, hang on, different Identity Crisis… Where she went back to basic again while still staying within the commercialised country music perameters (and pulled off an astonishing channelling of Patsy Cline in Lonesome). The even starker Suit Yourself free of any big-label interference and the simplest record she’d ever made, with a bare-minimum band and some killer backing singers (and paid far better tribute to The Man In Black in Johnny Met June than her over-produced Nashville era cover of I Walk The Line could hope for. And let's not forget that she played - and played very well - Johnny Cash's mother in Walk The Line the movie but got ignored when everybody fell over themselves bigging up Reece Witherspoon).

Then the spectacular ‘Actually I am the new Dusty Springfield and to prove it, here’s a bundle of Dusty covers Just  A Little Lovin’, taking Dusty’s kohl-rimmed smokiness and turning each of those songs into a tiny, intimate masterclass in what one girl, a guitar and a set of brushed drums can do.

It was then that she came over here to London to play a gig and promote JALL; one night at the Royal Festival Hall in the middle of Summer 2008. Sweltering day, my temper rising higher the later my date became. Eventually she turned up about an hour after the show was scheduled to start, with a friend, literally fresh off the plane from South Africa, in tow (I’d known about this in advance but had expected the friend to have gone straight back to the date’s flat). We picked up an extra ticket and went in; luckily we’d only missed the support act – and if you were that support act I’m sorry for being quite so dismissive of you. The date and her friend took the original two seats – I’d hate to leave a visitor to our fair land on her own in a strange concert hall – leaving me with the spare.

Ms. Lynne's promotional photographs
were always bound to attract
a certain type of gentleman

It’s a terrible thing that an artist like Shelby Lynne is as undervalued as she is, and an indicator of that undervalue is that in the circle of the RFH no more than the first six rows were occupied. The rest was yawningly empty, row after row of mocking beige seats. But that meant I could take my pick. Which I did.

Sitting and enjoying music with friends is a wonderful thing. But to sit in splendid isolation, watching one of your favourite artists perform without distraction, without someone else, someone unfamiliar with your entertainer whispering questions, giving their opinion…that is a thing passing sublime.

The first few songs – from the early albums – were overmiked, probably as the balance was designed for a full hall; the sound distorted by its own loudness, and I dreaded what might be to come. But by the time Shelby had got to the more reserved, intimate settings of JALL – and after she’d been delivered of a Jack and Coke with nowhere near enough ice for her taste - everything fell into place.

Look, the long and the short of it is that this woman could do no wrong for me. The next album, Tears Lies And Alibis wasn’t made available in the UK until nearly a year after JALL, but did I mind? No, I just paid big bucks for an import copy.

But.

Shelby’s most recent album is called Merry Christmas. It’s – yep – a Christmas album. OK, some of the songs are her own and I’m sure they’ll show the same levels of cynicism and disillusionment as her others, but nonetheless… A Christmas album. The first time I’ve not pre-ordered, or dashed to a shop on release day. Because I doubt that even this astonishing woman call pull off a Christmas album. As I said to the date; I don’t care what she looks like… A Christmas album?? Even I have some standards (and I don’t mean Little Drummer Boy).

Would you argue with her?

Even so, even though it’s only the end of March, I’m looking forward to December, because that’s the only time I’m going near this one.