Jeff Martin & J Cortez @ Jive,Adelaide (21/05/10)

Sun 23rd May, 2010 in Gig Reviews

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.

Tonight Jive was almost full and it seemed as though Jeff Martin’s appearance with his band The Armada at the recent WOMAD festival had pulled in a few new fans.

The evening began with the small and softly spoken Pear And The Awkward Orchestra. She played a nice set of quirky pop/folk songs on her guitar but was unfortunately drowned out by the very chatty audience. She tried to combat this towards the end of her set telling everyone to poke their neighbour then take 3 deep breaths but not much was achieved. Although she played beautiful songs, she was perhaps not the most appropriate support slot tonight.

After standing on the extremely sticky carpet of Jive for a while, Jeff Martin and J Cortez took the stage to a very enthusiastic audience. These 2 make up two thirds of The Armada with drummer Wayne Sheehy absent as he resides in Ireland and the Canadian Jeff is now a permanent Ozzie resident. The drums though were taken care of with Jeff’s stomp box and both him and J’s massive array of effects pedals. And for the die hard fans there were no fancy guitars tonight just a mandolin during the set along with acoustics and a bass.

The set began with candles twinkling on stage and some middle-eastern chants with the duo then ripping into regular set opener Morocco from the Armada’s debut and Jeff’s voice was in fine form along with the rumbling bass of J Cortez. This was followed by the Tea Party classic, The Bazaar. The Badger of the same album Edges Of Twilight also made it into the set as did In This Time from Spendor Solis which Jeff commented had been chosen to walk some 20 brides down the aisle to his knowledge. He then joked that potentially 20 years from now he’ll just be a wedding singer. His on stage banter was in fine form and he kept the audience amused and connected…except for all the morons there who were possessed by their i phones…how about enjoying some reality folks rather than wasting your lives away updating your miserable facebook profiles.

After an hour and a half of tracks spanning his career including an awesome cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, the audience were treated to an encore of Black Snake from the Armada album. Jeff worked the ladies as he began to moan as the track detoured into Whole Lotta Love singing “10 inches of my love” with an equally brooding theremin solo to finish the track.

It was midnight and the audience wanted more but their only option was to just wait in line for Jeff as he stated that they’d sign absolutely anything. Another great show from showman/ladies man Jeff Martin and his equally other ladies man J Cortez....

CHECK OUT ALL THE PHOTOS HERE.