Trends come and go, but quality will always survive just as long as there are people who know it’s out there. At 80 years old, and with some 50 albums released over 5 decades, Iain Matthews still has something to say – and the audience at Bonn Harmonie on Wednesday proved there are still people who want to hear him say it.

This has to be the most spartan stage I’ve ever encountered at Bonn Harmonie even for a duo. BJ Baartman is, in effect, the band and has a rack of three guitars admittedly but next to them stand a tiny portable amplifier. Matthews himself has just the one acoustic guitar which I assume is feeding into the Harmonie sound system somewhere – no sign of an amp onstage anyway. Both have a microphone, and that’s it. I jokingly suggested to BJ before the show that they could have stood on a beachtowel to delineate the stage area and he aknowledges the Harmonie stage is about the biggest they’ve played on lately. He’s never played here before but says he likes what he feels and sees. I’m hoping we will feel the same about the music.

I’m not really sure what to expect. I wasn’t even a teenager when Iain Matthews was a central part of the original Fairport Convention line-up. His tenure there was derailed by the arrival of Sandy Denny. The iconic singer brought with her not just a voice in a million but also traditional Folk songs rather than the contemporary direction Matthews was looking for. His biography ‘Thro’ my eyes’ reveals he was somewhat savagely sacked out of the blue by Fairport, and subsequently formed his own band ‘Matthews Southern Comfort’. The new band had colossal success in 1970 with an interpretation of Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Woodstock’ (ironically, neither Mitchell nor Matthews actually played at Woodstock). That’s the most famous part of Iain Matthews CV and all that I know, other than that he spent some years as a PR man until Robert Plant talked him back into making music instead of selling it so to speak.

This evening’s set opens with ‘Reno Nevada’ which is almost how Matthew’s career itself opened. The song goes back to the very early days of Fairport. After singing this, Matthews asks the audience “How many of you have seen me before?” When not many hands go up he seems amazed. “I’m 80 so I thought everyone who was interested had seen me by now!” he adds, and just maybe that reaction is why he is still playing – a new audience not attached to the ’60’s and ’70’s.

Except the audience is an aging one and Matthews himself seems still very much attached to those decades past. They surface regularly in his lyrics which often seem to yearn for a simpler time past. Most noticeably in one of the evening’s best numbers ‘Funk & Fire’ and it’s reflection on Hendrix and other legendary performers long gone:

‘1967, Imagine If You Will
There’s A Wild Man Dressed In Velvet
Like A Fool On The Hill
With No Expectations And Not A Moment Too Soon
We Were All Around The Watchtower
All In That Room’

There’s reflection on Woodstock too via Ian’s later interpretation of the song from his ‘Fake Tan’ disc. It’s darker and much more reflective compared to the hippie hopefulness of the original. This time around when he sings “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” it seems as if ‘the garden’ in question isn’t Eden but Max Yasgur’s farmland in Bethel and its values.

While there is a constant feeling and reference to times gone by in his music, Iain Matthews muses that he can’t understand songwriters he knows who stopped writing because they ran out of ideas. That’s a large part of his return to music he says. “There’s always something new. It’s just a case of being open to what’s happening around you”. I’m pleased to hear that because I came here to the Harmonie because of his reputation as a songwriter and he still delivers on that front – particularly when there’s a play-off between the past and the present. On ‘Digital Girl’ he’s the father from a vinyl world watching his daughter grow up in a Spotified digital world. “I thought my daughter would hate it, but I actually got her to supply some backing vocals” he laughs. He’s at his most reflective onn ‘Ripples in a stream’ where he’s the older, wiser man remarking how youth made him think he could change the world but how experience made him realize that when he was frantically “running blind, chasing a dream” he was really only “making ripples in a stream” and don’t we all look back at how unimportant the seemingly important was when we were young?

There’s a 10 pm curfew at Harmonie that both Matthews and Baartmans seem to genuinely wish didn’t exist. The songs and chats by Iain Matthews have been a pleasure to listen to. The melodius musical underpinning of Baartman’s trio of semi-electric guitars has soothed the soul (even a short break into Hendrix territory during ‘Funk & Fire’ was somehow calming in its delivery). I can’t imagine how this duo with this tiny set-up could annoy the neighbours. Maybe we could sneak in another hour? To paraphrase Iain’s new disc’s title – how much is enough? When it comes to music and songwriting of this quality, in this age of digital AI contrived muzak, there can never be enough Iain. I hope that sub-title on the disc saying ‘Volume One’ is more than just a gag. There is, as you say, so much out there to write about…