Bringing bluegrass to a Norwich basement: Colby T. Helms is as genuine as they come on his Tales From Virginia tour.
Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom. Norwich, UK. 04/02/25.
‘I like the hometown aspect,’ Virginia native Colby T. Helms explained as he said Norwich was his favourite UK city so far. After stops in Brighton and London, that’s a pretty good compliment for Norwich, pretty good and pretty understandable. On a Tuesday night in February, Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom - a city favourite pizza joint and gig venue - turned a little Appalachian and was the most sold stop of Helms’ tour so far (that’ll change if word spreads). We’re the City of Literature, so it’s no surprise that we value the storytellers.
Walking in through the front door and chatting with a few people in the bar before heading down to the basement, Helms brought an immediate sense of honesty and humility. Voodoo’s live music room is fun and intimate, a bar at one end, some sofas round the edge and a stage providing all you need for a good night. Hanging out at the merch table with his sunshiney girlfriend Jaylyn, Helms was ready to chat to those that had come to listen, and it was a genuine delight to talk with the two about music, the UK, and just how ‘green’ Virginia is.
Opening the gig with a half hour set was local artist Lucy Grubb, a rising artist on the British Americana scene. Moving effortlessly from music-lover in the audience, to music-lover on stage, she used a guitar and a warm personality to work her way through a number of very prettily written songs. ‘Do you still have Johnny on your bedroom wall? Do you still have problems with your alcohol? You don’t do anything for me no more’ she spins off on Anything For Me – a genius couple lines.
Helms walked on at exactly 9 o’clock, pairing his stage presence with an acoustic guitar and a can of Neck Oil (the man’s got good taste) and kicked off his set with Welcome to the Freakshow: ‘I try to play songs for all walks of life. If you’re here in this basement in Norwich, England then you’re probably one of the freaks too,’ he told us with an appreciative smile. Helms with his long hair, beard, denim dungarees (overalls for the Americans) and south-west Virginia accent could have been out of place in little-old-Norwich, but we take people in here and we listen. He was probably right: ‘welcome to the freakshow, where the beer’s always cold and the tunes are the bluest of blue’ – yeah, that sounds like Norwich.
Kicking into Higher Ground, the Tyler Childers comparisons are somewhat inevitable. Childers being a bit of a hero for Appalachian artists, Helms did have a voice and vibe reminiscent of the Kentucky native but he also had a gentle whimsy that was entirely his own. One that worked its way into his stories, both on stage and off.
Higher Ground from ‘Tales of Misfortune’, Colby T. Helms.
Almost entirely, the gig was fuelled by characters. The character of Colby T. Helms himself and the stories he chooses to tell us about his life, some of them humour filled and some a little more personal like the moving Daddy’s Pocket Knife. The character of his girlfriend’s dad on the Spanish-tinged outlaw song Armed and Dangerous. The character of his friend back home who cut it a little too close with hunting laws on Possum. Helms is an obvious observer, he watches people’s lives and can shape them into a country narrative with a tight bluegrass sound. As much as this was his night, he was observing even then – talking about his appreciation for UK audiences, watching his opener and excitedly exclaiming ‘she’s from here!’, and noticing just how many smiles he’d conjured up with his Tales From Virginia.
Before singing the unreleased song Clouds, one that’s ‘kind of a big f you to pop-country’, Helms mentioned that his new album was recorded in Nashville, somewhere he described as being ‘the birth of country music, but also the death of country music’. But when you’ve got a legend like David Ferguson (Childers, Sturgill Simpson, Johnny Cash) lined up to produce, you’d go to the ends of the Earth. Plans for the record to be half country and half bluegrass suggest that there are some very good things in store. But beyond that, it suggests that wherever he’s recording, and wherever he’s playing, Helms is wholeheartedly his genuine self.
A bluegrass cover of the Merle Haggard written, Lyrnd Skynrd covered Honky Tonk Night Time Man was a moment for Helms to lose himself in his picking – ‘with bluegrass, you just gotta go for it’ and that’s exactly what he did. Whilst his band, The Virginia Creepers, backs up Helms back home he was solo for this tour – it takes someone special to be capable of creating a sound that takes over a room, and Helms held his own. It’s even rarer to find someone that can cover a song so well that the original emotions become entirely their own - on a flawlessly reworked cover of Charlie Monroe’s Rosa Lee McFall, Helms made that bluegrass classic his.
A hell of a picker, a hell of a storyteller, a hell of a nice guy. I only hope he makes it back to the UK, maybe with The Virginia Creepers next time?
‘Thanks for supporting Virginian country music Daisy!’ he wrote on the vinyl copy of ‘Tales of Misfortune’ I bought, I’m not stopping anytime soon Colby – that’s for sure.
