Cowboy Junkies - In The Time Before Llamas

Tracks 1-11 recorded at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 1st May 1990,
broadcast 12th May 1990, BBC Radio One In Concert.

Tracks 12-17 recorded at The Royal Albert Hall, London 6th March 1992,
a further two tracks from this concert can be found on 200 More Miles, 1995.

Sleeve notes

They were alt.country before the genre ever existed. Think only of their name: it's just too, too perfect. When the Cowboy Junkies emerged from Toronto in 1985, followed by their self-released debut album Whites Off Earth Now! a year later,
nobody else was doing what they did: crafting music with the urges and structures of country and blues, plus the drifting ethereality and deconstructionist ruses of art-rockers like the Velvet Underground. Here was a rare, hazy beauty indeed.

The musical cognoscenti and the hippest of the hip twigged Whites Off Earth Now!, but it took 1988's major-label masterpiece
The Trinity Sessions to bring Cowboy Junkies to wider attention. These were haunting, spectral masterpieces, lovingly scripted by guitarist and songwriter Michael Timmins and voiced by his husky, heavenly-voiced sister Margo, a waif-like ingénue who had worked as a social worker before being persuaded by Michael to take to the stage. Meanwhile, their brothers Peter (drums)
and John (guitar, backing vocals) ensured Cowboy Junkies remained truly a family business.

They had completed a third album of narcotic ghost stories, 1990's traditional yet spacious and succulent The Caution Horses, before they recorded the first of these two concerts, at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre in May of the same year. The results were spectacular: this glancing, fascinating band were near their peak. Stealing - but oh, so charmingly! - from C&W, jazz, art-pop and even drone rock, they shaped a textured, impeccable set of dream-soul anthems that captivated even as they unfolded their lost, imagined, insatiable narratives.

Highlights? It's hard to know where to start. 'Me And The Devil', a Robert Johnson tune from the Whites Off Earth Now! album, turned the gritty blues of the original into a distant, spooked reverie. Likewise, the Lou Reed angst-anthem 'Sweet Jane' was a peculiarly serene take on the VU man's iconic attitudinal, fucked-up anthem. Their minimalist, scarcely-there dynamics helped, but so did the fact that Margo Timmins, caught between a half-breath and a whisper, recited Reed's rhapsody like it was the secret of life itself. For 3:41, maybe it was.

The reworking of 'Blue Moon' that was 'Song For Elvis' also enchanted, but in truth Cowboy Junkies' own songs were the strongest. 'Thirty Summers' from The Caution Horses was so slight and fragile it scarcely existed yet still resonated with passion, while 'Cause Cheap Is How I Feel', from the same album, sounded lost and lonely beyond human ken. No trained vocalist, Margo Timmins was still able to imbue these words - and the spaces between them - with vast, visceral yearning.

By the time of the second performance, at The Royal Albert Hall in March 1992, Cowboy Junkies had finished a fourth album, Black Eyed Man, and drew heavily from that record. 'Southern Rain' was more fleshed-out and country-tinged than their usual delicate divinations, but 'Murder, Tonight In The Trailer Park' found a by-now confident Margo Timmins evoking comparisons with Rickie Lee Jones: there is little higher praise. The covers they revitalised here - Dylan's 'If You Gotta Go, Go Now' and the Flying Burrito Brothers' 'Hot Burrito No 1' - were lithe, confident and fun.

Fun is not Cowboy Junkies' forte, though: captured on In The Time Before Llamas is a music of rapt, alien and often unearthly beauty, a fractured yet healing take on folk and country music that seems to beam in from somewhere the other side of silence. Impeccable mavericks and gentle geniuses, these Cowboy Junkies are a band like no other. Treasure them.

Ian Gittins
September 2003