Jon Gomm is now on a UK tour.
In this article I take a look at a gig from a tour three years ago.
In Review: Jon Gomm – The Faintest Idea tour
Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, 9 October 2021
Years ago, I was browsing guitar videos and chanced upon Jon Gomm. A friend immediately pointed him out as a particular recommendation, directing me to the viral 2012 hit Passionflower. As a middle-aged Gen Xer with a percussion background, beginning to learn guitar, it made an instant and lasting impression. I found Jon’s awesome percussive style a revelation, an inspiration and a delight.
Passionflower stands today as a great showcase for Jon’s style. He uses the guitar as a drum-kit effectively, the different parts of the guitar having their distinctive percussive sounds.
Passionflower sings of a flower growing within his sight, cracking up:
“through the pavement/In super, super slow motion/Though your back is gently breaking/You reach for the light
Bloom”
Passionflower lyrics
Sure, Jon does it really really well. But what really astonished me and took it to another level was a different technique Jon uses here. He re-tunes strings mid-song to form melodic phrases. I’d never seen this before, and it struck me as another insight drawn from an ability to see and interact with the world in fresh and inventive ways.
As a musician in today’s world, Jon has forged his own path, using internet independently to promote his work. His anti-corporate, anti-record label, and committed independent spirit as an artist stands out. This is evident in his media appearances, his own online communications, and a willingness to share his technique with those interested.
Jon remarked on the BBC interview above, by luck Jon’s guitar style became fashionable at the time of his viral breakout. But, there’s more to Gomm than being a technically brilliant guitarist with an unconventional style that happens to be on trend. His intriguing choices of subject matter invite reflection and thoughtful emotion. These choices are personal, observational, and philosophical. They sometimes verge on the phantasmagorical. As Jon commented to another reaction to Passionflower:
To me all that matters is the emotion the music conveys. I’d rather listen to someone pound on their instrument and wail, than something played perfectly with no meaning.
YouTube comment, Oct 2020
In 2020, Jon released his fourth album, The Faintest Idea, I got to see the Birmingham night of the accompanying tour, delayed by Covid-19 till 2021.
Jon began with the first single from the album, Cocoon, which explores the parenting dilemma summed up in the chorus:
Got to Cocoon her
Cocoon lyrics
Construct
A new womb for her
But will I
Teach her my fears if I try
To protect her?
Next up was another internet hit of Jon’s, a wonderful instrumental cover of Rufus and Chaka Khan’s Ain’t Nobody, developed, according to Jon, to appease audiences desperate, perhaps to the point of impoliteness, for him to play something they knew.
The epic Everything, a song declared to be about obsessive love, I thought showed off Jon’s range and technical ability to make meaning with sounds. His vocal styling in this one seemed to add a particular extra dimension.
For me the most intriguing and surprising aspect of the gig were songs which while clearly original, quote a well-known pop melody (if I recall correctly something from the Fine Young Cannibals?).
I mentioned how I admire Jon’s choices of subject matter. Jon introduced one song, Universal Biology, as being about his spiritual beliefs, which were ‘fact-based’. Jon talked about how we are all part of the universe, not outside of it, and the only creature we know of that knows we are the universe observing itself.
The strongest subject choice of the album is perhaps The Ghost Inside You. It is Jon’s instrumental response to the devastation of a miscarriage. He blogged here about the experience as “like grieving in reverse”. Here’s my view of that Birmingham night’s 2021 performance of The Ghost Inside You, presented with Jon’s permission:
Jon performed 2 songs for an encore. First Passionflower , then he stepped beyond the microphone and played unplugged. The song was in tribute to a friend of twenty years, sadly passed away two years previously. Despite standing towards the front I, struggled a little bit to hear the song, mainly because of the loud and potentially fractious argument just outside.
Concluding on a song of loss gave me an opportunity to reflect on death. The whole gig really was about communication, and it felt like a very personal and intimate communication of ideas about life, losses, politics, and human consciousness.
Thanks to Jon for his music and his ability to use it to communicate. I found the gig moving and inspiring. With further chances to see him, so you can take this reviewer’s recommendation, just as I followed my friends a few short summers ago.