Before Creedence Clearwater Review played a note of “Born on the Bayou” at the Half Moon last night, the room filled with the sound of crickets and swamp water. For its inevitable encore, helicopter blades cut through the room, the cue for “Fortunate Son.” Between numbers, a voiceover in a Southern drawl walked the crowd through the impact of the real band’s history before the Essex-based tribute band blasted into the next number.
We already made the case for going. Here’s what it was actually like.
Creedence Clearwater Revival were from El Cerrito, California, a world away from any bayou. But what they captured in the last years of the 1960s still stands true today, more than 50 years later.
Frontman Dale Taylor has spent ten years being John Fogerty’s voice on stages across Britain and Europe. But he has a surprising confession afterwards when he talks to Putney.news. “Never played the States. I don’t know, we don’t know how, I mean it’s a much bigger place. Would they take to a Brit band coming over?”
He does not need to find out. Creedence Clearwater Review play 60 to 70 shows a year, including dates in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and around 20 more each year in Germany and Switzerland. It is in Germany that the arithmetic gets strange.
“Crazily enough in Germany, it’s huge,” Taylor said. “In the way that like, here in the UK the Rolling Stones and the Beatles are household names… Creedence isn’t in people’s culture here. But in Germany they’re on the radio all the time and we’ve played to thousands of people, like a Thursday night, over a thousand people.”
Part of that popularity has a name. “Hey Tonight,” a Creedence single that never charted in the UK, reached number one in Germany. It means the setlist needs careful handling on both sides of the Channel.
“There is a hit that was a big hit in Germany that wasn’t here, so we have to make sure that doesn’t get left off the setlist,” Taylor said. “It’s a sort of sing-a-long-y pop rock kind of song, over here I don’t think it even charted, or certainly not high. But it was number one in Germany.”
Taylor’s own favourites are “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son” and “As Long As I Can See the Light,” and after ten years none of them have worn thin. “We’ve been doing this like 10 years and it feels like we’re playing our own songs now, and we’re never sick of them, night after night, they’re always fun. Literally every time Bad Moon Rising’s always as fun as the first time we ever played it.”
It showed. Taylor and his three bandmates worked the room from the first chord, and by “Fortunate Son” the floor in front of the stage was packed. Taylor loves playing Putney and he tells us why.
“There’s a lot of places in the country where we tour where it takes two-thirds of the show to get the crowd going,” he said, “whereas in this really cool little club, from the first song, they’re up and going.”
The Half Moon provided exactly that: up and going, dancing under green light in a room built for a few hundred people, for a band that fills rooms of a thousand a few hundred miles away and has never crossed the Atlantic to try a bigger one.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he tells the audience after the second encore. “Catch you next year, right?”
