Mike Doughty – London Relentless Garage

February 2nd 2010

“I want to be on you”.  Ron Burgundy’s “immortal words” are those chosen by Mike Doughty to sell himself to the British public.

Doughty, formerly of alt-rock band Soul Coughing, is pretty popular in the States, but relatively unknown here.  My question referred to selling himself to us in the style of a dating ad.  His witty answer, I come to realise, is standard.

The American singer-songwriter is a fairly open book, regularly tweeting (find him @mikedoughtyyeah) and blogging on his website, where he comments honestly on his day to day activities and thoughts on the happenings in the world; two recent tweets include “Lousy night. Crowd couldn’t have cared less” and “Salinger gone – perhaps we’ll at last hear his Rock Opera”.  Is it important for him to keep in touch with fans? “I think it ends up being important, but the reason I do it is just my general obsession with killing time online” he says. “I think my crowd feels pretty close to me because of the access I give to myself, but I don’t think it’s necessarily vital to being a musician these days”.

This openness has extended to a book about his previous life as a drug addict, which he’s in the process of writing.  Mike claims “writing prose is a lot more time consuming than song writing” and that “linear thinking”  is not his strength.  He’s currently struggling to write about his time with Soul Coughing, describing it as “pretty shitty”.
Another way his fans get to know about him is through the Question Jar, something passed round at his gigs where people can put questions in for him to answer.  He told me he’d not had it on this tour because his German wasn’t good enough to answer the questions – he’d been touring Germany and Switzerland for two weeks before playing London – and that he wished he’d brought it along for his gig at the Relentless Garage, but as it happened he ended up inviting the audience to shout out questions to him anyway.   There were a large amount of Americans in the crowd, many of them obviously long-time fans, as lots of the questions were, by Doughty’s admission, in-jokes regarding Dave Matthews (of the Dave Matthews Band; Doughty supported him in Soul Coughing, and is now signed to his record label) and various song lyrics. He claims the best questions he’s had to date are “Would you rather punch a kitten in the face or play Twister with Dick Cheney?” and “Have you ever considered a life as a Ghostbuster?” – unfortunately he didn’t tell me the answers to either.

Mike’s here to promote his new album Sad Man Happy Man, which is a lot more stripped down compared to his previous work – mainly in response to his fans.  He said the last album, Golden Delicious, “was received as kind of a betrayal – they thought it was too fluffy. I’d been doing gigs with just my cello player, Scrap Livingston -pretty bare bones, so it was pretty natural just doing a record that was stripped down like that”.  This time, the response was a lot more positive, demonstrated at the sold-out gig by rapturous applause after every track and numerous encores.

Doughty was the embodiment of stripped down, wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans, with only his guitar for company,  and he managed to engage and entertain the crowd for an hour and half.  The set was a chance to showcase the new tracks with old favourites like ‘27 Jennifers’, ‘Nectarine’, and the two songs probably most well known by his British fans – ‘Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well’ and ‘I Hear The Bells’ – both of which have been featured on various US TV shows, most notably Grey’s Anatomy.  Asked how he felt about TV syncs, he replied, “I watch too much TV to really complain about it as a sellout. I don’t think I’d give my music to booze or cigarette commercials, but other than that, I’m not bummed out by the association.”

Mike’s humour entertained the crowd just as much as his music, regularly ad-libbing funny lyrics – much to the audience’s amusement – and giving good banter between the songs.  Toward the end of the show, he stopped and said he was about to play the “fake last song”, instructed us to cheer loudly afterwards while he turned around and pretended to be surprised, before going into the ‘encore’.  But in actual fact, he ended up doing two real encores, in addition to the fake one – and the crowd still demanded more.

Mike Doughty hadn’t played in the UK for 10 years before this gig, but I suspect he’ll be back a lot sooner next time.  To paraphrase a certain Mr. Burgundy – I love Mike. Mikey, Mike, Mike…