FOR a moment or two, Lucinda Williams almost looks frail. Escorted up the steps onto the Barbican stage, blinking into the light, she glances down at her lyrics for reassurance while supporting herself on a chair. But after speaking to her engineer and adjusting her monitor levels, her whole demeanour changes. “When Momma’s happy,” she reassures us with a smile, “everyone’s happy.” Williams is now almost 70 and suffered a stroke a couple of years ago. But although she’s not playing guitar tonight, she assures us that the effects are only temporary. She’s back in the driving seat and we’re off, down the lost highways and haunted backroads of one of the richest, most defiant songbooks in modern American music.
Dressed in a simple black shirt and jeans, her hair as silver-grey as the frosty London skies, Williams is backed tonight – as she has been since 2014’s Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone – by Buick 6. The tight ensemble is founded on the bass and drums of David Sutton and Butch Norton (resplendent tonight in a ten-gallon hat) with the twin lead guitars of Stuart
Matthis and Doug Pettibone roaming free. But there are plenty of ghosts up on stage with her too. Early on she performs a new song, “Stolen Moments”, in memory of her friend Tom Petty, who with his 1996 cover of “Changed The Locks” did as much as anyone to bring Williams’ songs to the attention of the wider world. She apologises later for singing so many songs about people who have died – not just Petty but also her old manager Frank Calliri, Jeff Beck and Clyde Joseph Woodward III, the East Texas anarchist and gumbo chef who inspired “Lake Charles”. “It feels cathartic for me,” she confesses.