Bill Callahan
EarTH, Hackney, Wednesday July 2, 2025
In the mid-1990s, Bill Callahan – then operating as Smog – and Will Oldham – using various names involving Palace – released their records in the UK on the Domino label. At some point around then, I recall a conversation with Domino’s boss, Laurence Bell, where he passionately promised me that in 20 or 30 years’ time, Callahan and Oldham would be seen as pre-eminent songwriters of their generation.
At the time, even though I liked both artists very much, it seemed far-fetched: Smog and Palace albums were compelling and crafted, but were also firmly in the lo-fi bracket. The idea of Callahan and Oldham, both prickly and strange cult figures, becoming canonical legacy artists seemed the indulgence of their record label, for the most part.
And yet every time Bill Callahan releases a new record, and every time he comes back to play London, I’m struck more and more by the prescience of Bell’s words. Callahan has released 19 albums now, the last seven under his own name. Of those, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle came second in MOJO’s 2009 Albums Of The Year List; Apocalypse 23rd in 2011; Dream River first in 2013; Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest second in 2019; Gold Record fourth in 2020; and Reality seventh in 2022.
It's a remarkable and consistent run that perhaps only Nick Cave can match in recent years, and the richness of Callahan’s catalogue is on full display at this solo gig at Dalston’s Earth Theatre. An hour or so into the show, Callahan pauses to retune and observes, in the wry and friendly manner that he’s grown into in recent years, “Well, I’m just playing every song I can think of.” In response, the crowd spend the next couple of minutes bombarding him with requests, but there’s a striking lack of consensus in the tracks they’re asking for. Callahan, it seems, has an embarrassment of classics.
Which means, of course, that more or less whatever he plays can feel in some way like a greatest hits set, even though he’s never had anything remotely resembling a hit. While last year’s London shows at the ICA featured him sparring with the great drummer, Jim White (a live album, What A Night!, was sneak released on Bandcamp at the end of June), tonight is a one-man band set-up. Callahan triggers a drumpad with his right foot, a cymbal with his left, and uses a guitar to construct an often minimal scaffolding to hang his words on.
Often, that scaffolding bears scant resemblance to the original version of the song, or to previous live versions. While Callahan’s music has often been compared with Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed, there’s a striking affinity with Bob Dylan now, insofar as live shows invariably shape up as an opportunity to worry away at the structure, pace, melody and stress points of each individual song. Cold Blooded Old Times, startlingly bouncy when it first emerged in 1999, has an almost totally new tune here; an ominous, motoring throb that points up its late Velvets affinities in a vividly precise new way.
Cold Blooded Old Times is one of three songs Callahan plays from Knock Knock, along with Let’s Move To The Country – a lyric which, perhaps, has grown sweeter and truer over time – and a superb Teenage Spaceship (only recently back in Callahan’s rotation). There are, in fact, more Smog-era songs in the set, with four more – a beautiful Say Valley Maker, Rock Bottom Riser, the cycling mantric folk of The Well, his rewiring of In The Pines – from 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, the album that was his last as Smog, and his first to more fully engage with a kind of transcendentalist vision that has sustained him ever since.
There is, too, a rare outing for Red Apples from 1997’s Red Apple Falls, a record of which I wrote about in NME at the time, “He appears finally to have manoeuvred himself comfortably into the pantheon of great, self-consciously tragic singer-songwriters,” evidently having absorbed Laurence Bell’s theory by then.
What happened with Callahan, of course, is that he became notably less tragic with age, and the latter-day songs he plays are imbued with a humanity that would’ve seemed implausible in the mid 1990s. 747, from 2019’s Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, is a frank reckoning with parenthood that is unflinching but fundamentally entranced: “We turn darkness into morning.”
These newer songs, too, are more elaborately played than some of the very older ones. Eid Ma Clack Shaw (2009) comes decorated with rippling guitar lines that seem to contain reverberant echoes of dub reggae; Coyotes (2022) is just beautiful, ebbing strums that cascade behind that baritone which only becomes richer and more emotionally resonant with age.
In the silent moment before Coyotes begin, the sound of a telephone rings in the venue. “I’m not here,” Callahan says. But 35 years after his now-staggering career began, he has never been more fully, satisfyingly present.
Bill Callahan, EarTh, Hackney, July 2, 2025 Setlist:
Jim Cain
Eid Ma Clack Shaw
747
Cold Blooded Old Times
Riding for the Feeling
Coyotes
Teenage Spaceship
Partition
Cowboy
Natural Information
Red Apples
Say Valley Maker
The Well
Let's Move to the Country
In the Pines
Rock Bottom Riser
Photo: Bill Callahan at the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Austin, Texas October 28, 2021 (Credit: Rick Kern/Getty Images)