Gig review: BRANDON GIBBS and JOEL HOEKSTRA at the Black Heart, London

Gig review: Brandon Gibbs and Joel Hoekstra at the Black Heart, London, April 13 2023

By STEVE MASCORD

THERE is a temptation, even a compulsion – for me anyway – to place the show I’m reviewing into some wider context.

What does it tell us about current musical trends, or the state of the music industry, or the human condition? What did we learn about the very essence of existence during a 10-song set in a smelly pub?

Joel Hoekstra is one of Whitesnake’s current guitarists. Brandon Gibbs is a long time Poison alumni who was in Devil City Angels with members of that band and Cinderella and who joined Poison as a what can best be described as a “non-core member” during the recent Stadium Tour with Def Leppard and Motley Crue.

They are second generation commercial metal guys; they weren’t around during the glory days.

Tonight’s show was moved from the neighbouring Underworld to the smaller upstairs concert space at the Black Heart in Camden so you can bet “commercial” describes the genre of music but not the bottom line of this two-man acoustic tour.

You grab a beer and go upstairs and this could be anything. It could be great, it could hover somewhere just above dire. Either way, it’s unlikely you are going to learn anything about the human condition.

The first thing is: I honestly didn’t think I’d ever hear any Devil City Angels songs live. The band is active in a technical sense but hasn’t done anything lately.

One of these songs, Gibbs tells us, is about being in love with a girl who’s in love with Bret Michaels.

Secondly, I didn’t expect to see any Joel Hoekstra’s 13 material live. “Hard To Say Goodbye” is a superior song and it’s great here. He’s got a third album from the project coming this soon and says his record company will “remove his hands” if he tells you what it’s. “That’s a joke,” he adds quickly. You can look up who his record company is; I ain’t going there.

The third song in the set is “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, the second-last is “Give Me Something To Believe In” and the last is “Hear I Go Again”.

(The second of these, a massive Poison hit, seems largely unknown to the London crowd)

In between there’s Hoekstra singing “Love Me Two Times”, the pair combining for an acoustic “Kashmir”, a bit of Petty, a bit more Whitesnake, some flamenco-leaning geetar picking from Joel.

You’d be a harsh critic, in a terrible mood or a hater of the material not to enjoy yourself.

And then Gibbs tells us that his father, who encouraged him to be a musician when he was a child, is too ill to attend shows now but spoke to him in a trans-Atlantic phone call a few hours before the show.

Gibbs senior told his son how proud he was of him to be playing a show in London, that it was “what he was put on earth to do”.

It was a touching moment. Brandon followed up by playing his solo song “Rich For Life”.

Turns out we got a bit of the human condition after all.