Photo by Melissa Mann/The Mirror.
If you’ve ever been to the Fairfield Theater Company, you know that it’s the perfect place for an intimate concert. A small stage, it’s perfect for bands like Barefoot Truth, a self-proclaimed acoustic rock band with a reggae infusion, whose musical style can take advantage of the small area and can better interact with an audience.
But picture that with a dance party of drunken rugby players in the audience?
That’s essentially what happened this weekend, as Barefoot Truth played at the Fairfield Theater Company on Sunday night as part of its CD release tour. It was preceded by Bronze Radio Return, a similar sounding acoustic/rock/folk band, whose lead singer strangely had a southern accent when he sang, but disappeared when he talked. However, the band did an impressive percussion number on trash cans, and a few songs were done using an old radio microphone, to give a diffused sound to the lead singer’s voice.
When Barefoot Truth came to the stage to headline, the rest of the audience met the drunken rugby players. A group of apparently college-aged men, they screamed and jumped and clapped for Barefoot like they’d seen nothing better. The band’s guitar player asked if they played sports, which resulted in a resounding “RUGBY” scream.
Albeit distracting, they helped keep the intensity up in the audience while Barefoot maintained its energy up on stage. The song “Spoonful” was one of its best, and all of the songs were high-energy and featured a number of amazing piano solos from the newest member of the band.
Things really started to get crazy after Barefoot played one of its biggest hits, “Roll if You Fall,” and broke out into their folk-rock version of “Single Ladies” midway through the song. The rugby players (and the rest of the audience, I should say), went nuts, and they promptly started a dance party in front of the stage.
What really helped was that Barefoot was extremely easy-going throughout the entire thing, joking around with the audience and even high-fiving the rugby players. They seemed to feed off of the crowd’s excitement, jumping around on stage themselves. At the same time, they looked as if they had never seen anything like it in their lives. I can’t imagine a wild dance party is typical at acoustic rock concerts.
The band ended up coming back for an encore, where they played “The Office” theme song (complete with an incredible harmonica part … who would have ever guessed that would happen?) before finishing up with a track off their new album. They were met with raucous applause, and it was well deserved — the band was extremely talented, and it proves that seeing a show live is far more telling than what you can hear on Pandora.
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