Nick Mulvey Live in London.

BY ALEX ZINOVIEFF
MONDAY, 17TH MARCH 2014

There are three truths in life. Death, taxes, and that you’ll probably really like Nick Mulvey’s music. I have no idea who YOU are. The chances are we have never met, but I don’t need to know you to know that you would probably really like a mesmeric nylon stringed guitar, and the warm voice of Nick Mulvey’s take on acoustic folk-pop. It is an extensively tested fact, based on the sturdiest of empirical evidence.

His voice is like velvet, and his guitar is like a whooshing magic carpet through a warm summers night - dreamy and comforting, but exciting. The closest thing to riding the carpet, is to go to a live show of his. It’s an amazing thing.

On this occasion, as when I’ve seen him before, he played without the embellishment of a band - alone on stage with just his guitar. It was like having the door to the songs opened in front of our eyes. I often wonder whether beautiful super-models are actually beautiful once they are stripped of their clothes, and washed of their make-up. It was exactly this process that Mulvey’s songs undertook at the point of presentation to the Scala crowd. Like the modified women on the catwalk, his music is incredible in the way it is produced on record, but more impressively, they are also completely brilliant in their most stripped back form, too.

Mulvey has a method of strumming, tapping, tuning (with two capo’s) and singing that creates an almost orchestral effect of many instruments all intertwining. It’s spectacular. We all stood throughout, like a hoard of open-mouthed victims of the swirling eyes of a hypnotising python.

My favourite two songs from the evening are two of my favourite songs of the last rolling year. Fever to the Form, and Cucurucu are the stuff of dreams, and lifted everybody in the crowd into another dimension for a few minutes.