Sunday Times
COWBOY JUNKIES
Union Chapel, London, Sunday 11th March 2007

In November 1986, The Cowboy Junkies huddled around a single microphone in a Toronto church to record their breakthough second album, The Trinity Sessions. The four Timmins siblings played country music in a spacious, spooked style, like a Nashville Velvet Underground, but when their third album, The Caution Horses, arrived on a major label sounding more conventional, it seemed their experimental leanings might have been accidents of economy rather than artisitic choices.

Tonight, the Union Chapel’s stately 19th century architecture, and the group’s acoustic trio format augers well. They open with a gloriously somnambulent version of Neil Young’s Powderfinger, with Michael Timmins’ minimal guitar implying Young’s famous lead. Songs from the forthcoming At The End Of Paths Taken album take on softer hues here, with Jeff Bird supplying some especially elliptical harmonica solos. The singer Margo Timmins sometimes undermines her brother’s lyrics with stagey gestures and actorly intonations, but a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s Flying Shoes sees her and the group finally achieve the gloriously sedated country groove their name implies. With most gigs you spend an hour waiting for the band to hit a peak. With the Cowboy Junkies you’re hoping they’ll find the confidence to do less. An encore of The Trinity Sessions’ Misguided Angel is spolied by a middle-aged man in a blue shirt doing a ridiculous bent-double run from the toilet in front of the stage, reminding us, in the midst of a glimpse of heaven, that we are foolish mortals with no sense of timing.

If the Cowboy Junkies had actually gone away, they’d be ripe for a comeback. A clever promoter would ask them to perform The Trinity Sessions in its entireity and their stock would rise. As it is, they just need to remind everyone that they’re still here.