Joseph Arthur, West Hampstead Arts Club, 23 March 2026
Tonight, Joseph Arthur demonstrates why, in the era of AI, we should do all we can to keep music live and local. While there’s a frisson in large crowds and stadium spectaculars and performers like Arthur can more than hold own in such spaces, being up close and personal in a tiny basement venue has both an intimacy and honesty that cannot be replicated.
Tonight, there is humour in adversity when a string breaks during a song about Satan. Arthur reacts by quickly setting up a series of loops that lead into a stunning performance of ‘Travel as Equals’ while he also restrings and retunes his guitar. Then he quips he’d better sing about God instead. A new song ‘I Wanna Know You’ quickly follows. This demonstration of human virtuosity and ingenuity would be impossible for a computer following pre-learnt patterns or in a scripted show, where a roadie would simply have appeared with another guitar.
Arthur’s set begins with a selection of new songs from his epic triptych of upcoming albums grouped under the overall heading of You’re Not A Ghost Anymore. Supplemented for much of the set by Melanie Gabriel as backing vocalist and Gonzalo Carrera on keyboards, this new material displays his trademark lyrical flourishes combined with earworm tunes while delving deeper into the spirituality that has always informed his music.
Anguished heads, hands and hearts in the form of two painting by Arthur provide a backdrop to the themes of falling and rising on the road to freedom that are threaded through tonight’s selection of new and old songs. Arthur is both a talented expressionist artist as well as a singer songwriter who has a wicked way with words. He appears initially wearing a black jacket covered in blue marks like brushstrokes – paint-spattered! – that was later abandoned as the heat on the small stage accumulated.
The great Arthur songbook is now extensive combining both depth and quality. A consummate solo artist who self describes as ‘someone struggling to heal over experimental folk-rock’, he was first discovered by Peter Gabriel and has subsequently played in supergroups with the likes of Dhani Harrison and Ben Harper (Fistful of Mercy), Peter Buck (Arthur Buck), and Jeff Ament (RNDM). That he returns to his roots as a solo performer creating a fuller sound through inventive use of loops while playing venues like West Hampstead Arts Club is testament to his commitment both to his music and his fans.
Tonight’s selection from his songbook spanned all bases from his debut Big City Secrets to the upcoming You’re Not A Ghost Anymore: Faith. When the harmonica brace first went on, an audience request was made for ‘Mercedes’. That song appeared later in the solo portion of the set, as did ‘Downtown’, when Arthur actually asked for a request.
Highlights from a stellar set included ‘No Weapon’, based on the freedom that is found through forgiveness – ‘faith is hard but the only solution in a world full of spiritual pollution’; ‘Nobody’s War’ – ‘Nobody here wants your war’ and ‘More money, more death, more greed, makes the children bleed’; as well as the raucous singing of a Ho’oponopono mantra together with the crowd during the encore – ‘I love you, I’m sorry, Please forgive me, And thank you’.
Arthur sees that ‘Our society encourages division’ and that ‘hanging onto resentment is encouraged by both sides in the battle for freedom’. He believes that it is only through forgiveness that we are able to find ‘the way out of the cage of what happened to us and our world’. As he leads us in the collective singing of the closing mantra, we glimpse what he means when he says ‘Forgiveness just means letting go of the hatred that poisons our own world and hearts’.
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Jonathan Evens
(live photo by the author)