A late addition to the festival proved to be the highlight: a scarred, bullet-headed, 40-something New-York-Stater, whose scatter-gun approach took everyone first by surprise and then by delight. Ed Hamell's gig was one of those rare things: gobsmacked shock, laugh-out-loud catharsis, an intensity that never once became overbearing.
Hamell is a veteran of late 1970s/early 1980s New York also-ran punk rock bands, the kind that are probably good enough to be The Clash, but failed because of poor location and lack of an opportune zeitgeist. He looks a refugee, also, of too many battles with the music industry, which is probably why he and his battered acoustic guitar look so good together. But you'd be wrong in thinking that Hamell is but another member of the sensitive singer/songwriter brigade. Think not David Gray or Tom McRae, but an unplugged hybrid of The Stooges and Motorhead fronted by an amalgam of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Bill Hicks and James Ellroy.
"I got some good bestiality jokes, but let's get to know each other better first," he says before launching into almost 90 minutes of the most visceral acoustic-based material this writer has ever heard. Taking material from his recent Choochtown release and from his two deleted albums, Big As Life and The Chord Is Mightier Than The Sword, Hamell's rapacious gift as a storyteller is interspersed with self-interruptions and a performance that mixed the self-deprecatory with the openly confrontational.
From the bitter, side-splitting I Hate Your Kid and the tearinducing, song-for-mom Open Up The Gate For Her to The Ramones' Rockaway Beach, from foul-mouthed audience put-downs to filthy jokes (really funny ones, too), Hamell On Trial got away scot-free. In a sentence? The kind of experience where total strangers just looked at each other and smiled at the brilliance of it all, knowing they'd witnessed something really, truly exceptional.
