Canada’s Great Lake Swimmers have been releasing and playing their take on indie-folk for just over 20 years.
When their songwriter and singer Tony Dekker tells the crowd about this feat, during the Bristol leg of their stripped back acoustic tour this week, he seems a little incredulous.
Where did the time go?
Given their long career so far it seems fitting for Dekker and crew to take a beat and look back to what they’ve achieved over nine albums.
So here we find them, back in the UK, a country that Dekker first started to play as Great Lake Swimmers (when he just had “a great name for a band but no band”) to promote their latest album In Pieces: An Acoustic Retrospective, which takes us through a couple of decades worth of melancholy, wistful songs.
On this tour they are a trio, with Ryan Grenville Martin on drums and bass and Colleen Brown on guitar, keyboards and bass too. Could it be they were meant to be a quartet with a bassist in tow too?
There is a fourth, invisible member too. The natural landscapes, rivers and mountains of Canada that have so influenced Dekker’s music, particularly the rushing Niagara River near his home.
Great Lake Swimmers
This hour and a half retrospective set, including encore, worked well for the sold out Louisiana largely hardcore fan crowd, which at 140 capacity is one of Bristol’s smaller venues.
It was also good for those who know only a handful of songs or are seeing them for the first time, as it provided a fascinating insight into their music.
With nine albums worth of material and a solo album too from Dekker, there will inevitably be some fans’ favourites that miss out, but it was a strong greatest hits set.
My personal favourite Pulled the Line from 2010’s Lost Channels was a welcome addition for me.
Another high point was Your Rocky Spine from 2007’s Ongiara. What a wonderful song.
But there was so much more, including lovely versions of Moving Pictures, Silent Films from their 2003 debut, and the title track from 2005’s Bodies and Mind.
More obscure tracks, including Somewhere Near Thunder Bay from Dekker’s 2013 solo album Prayer of the Woods, also nestled in the set list.
What was nice about the gig was the respect the trio had for each other, with Brown providing musical gravitas and Ryan Grenville Martin providing the laughs among the melancholy.
His father is from Bristol, he tells us. The crowd like that. Ryan is also wearing “a lot of polyester” so he and Brown left Dekker to plough through a couple of tracks on the encore himself.
For the first of these Dekker took a request. Annoyingly for his guitar tuning a shout of ‘Respect for All Living Things’ was the loudest. As Dekker pointed out to the other guitarists in the room, this was a DADGAD tuned song with a capo at the fifth. He also apologised for the lack of a huge choir on stage, as the track is augmented by on 2023’s Uncertain Country.
And then I Saw You in the Wild, from Bodies and Minds closes this most satisfying of gigs.
Support on this tour is from Tim Crabtree, a Brit, who relocated for years to Canada and now lives in Berlin and performs as Paper Beat Scissors.
Paper Beat Scissors
He was mesmerised by the attentive crowd, with pretty much all the 140-capacity crowd wanting to see the support too. Quiet throughout, they were perfect for his intricate songs, haunting vocals and precise guitar picking. He is an artist I will be checking out further, especially songs from his 2019 album Parallel Line.
By Joe Lepper
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