Loudon Wainwright III - Christmas Carols In November

Artwork

Disc 1

  1. Five Years Old
  2. Between
  3. Suddenly It's Christmas
  4. Conspiracies
  5. Christmas Morning
  6. Movies Are A Mother To Me
  7. Make Your Mother Mad
  8. Your Mother And I
  9. The Shit Song
  10. The Picture
  11. This Song Don't Have A Video
  12. You Don't Want To Know
  13. Unhappy Anniversary
  14. Red Guitar
  15. Father/Daughter Dialogue *
  16. You Never Phone, You Never Write *
  17. Come A Long Way *
  18. School Days *
  19. Green Green Rocky Road (Chandler/Kaufman) *

Disc 2

  1. Me And All The Other Mothers
  2. Homeless
  3. Swimming Song
  4. He Said, She Said
  5. Pretty Good Day So Far
  6. Sometimes I Forget
  7. White Winos
  1. Things
  2. Out Of This World *
  3. Dead Skunk *
*
w/ Martha Wainwright

Recorded live at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in Cambridge, England on November 8, 1999.

Now this is what bootleg trading is all about. I was at this gig during my first year as an undergrad in Cambridge, when a cynical American singer-songwriter was the perfect antidote to my usual mid-November grumpiness (basically caused by the onset of Christmas commercialism).

This is a great gig, unpredictably pitching from haunting beauty to outright hilarity. The segment from Swimming Song through to Sometimes I Forget consists of Loudon taking audience requests.

I stumbled across this recording on a tradelist some four years later. It seems to me that recordings are very rarely made in the Corn Exchange, making this even more of a rare gem. It's a fairly clear Minidisc recording, although the sound quality isn't the best and the taper himself is rather vocal at times.

This obviously won't mean as much to somebody who wasn't there, who doesn't have recollections of the elderly woman bellowing along to The Shit Song or lending their voice to Dead Skunk to close out proceedings, but it's still highly recommended.