Dressy Bessy - Live at the Betsey Trotwood, London

  by Olga Sladeckova

published: 24 / 1 / 2002

intro

Denver bubblegum pop group Dressy Bessy recently finished a brief tour of Britain. Olga Sladeckova describes the tour's last night at the group's label Track and Field's own pub-club, the Betsey Trotwood, in London.

Betsey Trotwood, is a friendly, but tiny two floor pub-club in King’s Cross in Central London. Its style of the music can be simply characterized as that "played by Track & Field", a popular local indie-pop record label, whose owner Steve also manages the venue. On the night of the 21st January, the first floor had been handed over to the “family”. The American group Dressy Bessy, whose recent album 'Pink Hearts Yellow Moons' was released on Track & Field, had popped in to play the last in a series of European tour dates. The tiny room, which is warmly painted in red and is reminiscent in it size of a large lounge, was already full by the time Saloon, another of Track & Field’s bands, started off proceedings with some sophisticated pop melodies. Dressy Bessy, which consists of Tammy Ealom (vocals), Rob Green (guitar, vocals), Darren Albert (drums, vocals) and John Hill (guitars, vocals) and who come from Denver. came on stage at Twenty past Ten.. ‘Hangout Wonderful’, the first song played, immediately got the audience moving with its swingy rhythm. The joyful tunes of subsequent songs such as ‘Found Out’, ‘Lookaround’ or ‘Just Like Henry’ have sweet and rousing melodies that make you just want to jump around. Actually, that is what we all did. “Take a look around and you find that I wasted my time” sings Tammy on ‘Take a Look Around’ while we were wearing ourselves out dancing around. The band was obviously enjoying themselves as well, cracking jokes between songs and laughing with the audience. Halfway through the night, the band aired some new material that will appear on their forthcoming album ‘Sound Go Round’ It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the lyric. The rhythm is always familiar with Dressy Bessy, so nobody loses the tune. Just before Half past Eleven the band thanked Steve and everybody else who had come along and rounded the gig off with few more summery songs from ‘Pink Hearts.’ “Thank you”, are the last words of the band and we thank them back with keen applause. There has been a bootleg recorded that night and that the gig had been worthwhile was proved when Tammy asked my friend: “Will you send me a copy?” The bad news, however. was that the tape-recorder had gone on strike. The gig will, therefore, stay with us only in our memories. Shame !

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