Nick Waterhouse was the last act I saw at Make Music Pasadena, and the crowd around the Levitt Pavilion got very dense. It wasn’t a surprise as I already knew Waterhouse’s close-to-perfect vintage music, and his band’s super tight style going into pure rockabilly energy, but it’s very simple you can’t go more retro than this!
Nick carries a vague nerd look, the clean haircut with the Buddy Holly glasses (he may even look a bit like him) and you can tell he was probably the more timid kid in the classroom, but his passion for this crisp and retro sound, slightly preceding Elvis and the rock & roll invasion, totally made a performer out of him. He is certainly pre Beatles, and pre everything that would fit his age – he is not even 30 – but he makes you swing in his well-oiled time travelling machine as if it was 1964.
Surrounded by a full band with saxophone, keys and a wonderful back up singer with a soulful soprano, he made people dance at sunset with his vintage brand of rhythm & blues, injected of soul, swing, doo-wop and jazz. His songs sound so close to 50-60’s classics you could be fooled for a little while, until you realize you have never heard them. Oh I had heard them before, because I had seen him before, but you know what I mean, they are Waterhouse originals and they sound timeless.
May be it is his young face, his dynamism, the lively ensemble of the band, but he always installs a very upbeat and joyous ambiance, and you realize soon this is hardly about nostalgia, as there is a real authenticity behind Nick Waterhouse’s music.
The sax injected in many songs accompanies the slick rhythm section as if it was a Cab Calloway song, the backup singer adds lovely and gospelic vocal parts, the keyboard is wobbling like it would for a Ray Charles number, and the songs leave some space for some great guitar solos. His detractors may find him too close to the originals for comfort, but Nick Waterhouse probably does not care, he captures the sound of the golden age of music like nobody else.
Before an encore, he concludes with ‘Time’s All Gone’ the title track of his debut album, and this sums up all, a song where the confident voices have a large part above the sax, where there is the right amount of clapping and screaming, and a sense of timing delivered with style and skills. For the best or the worst, Waterhouse got this one placed in a Lexus commercial, and with two albums on his sleeve, he has already toured Europe and Australia, and produced the Allah-Las, another LA band going deep into the 60’s. Some people with long skirts started to dance and the place looked like the early years of American bandstand, the Hairspray years when girls were wearing little white socks with their high heels. Nick Waterhouse seems to have recreated the world he wanted to live in and the best part is that he is providing the soundtrack.
