Chuck Prophet, Mid Sussex Music Hall, Hassocks review - the good American

Thirty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk architects of what became Americana. Now he’s 61 and playing in a sold-out pub back-room in Hassocks, a downland commuter village near Brighton, still giving his all during two hours of humour and humane passion as if this is the biggest stage, and this crowd a community clearly worth serving.

Green On Red proved to be a youthful waystation of high times and burnout, on the road to a greater career spent reinvigorating rock’n’roll’s essential language with Prophet’s songcraft and innately wry, kind heart. He’s here on the home straight of his most extensive ever UK tour with a new sound and band courtesy of the Cumbia Shoes, including members of ¿Qiensave?, Mexican-Californian maestros of Cumbia, Columbian music which recalls rock’s original offer to dance your cares away. The genre was a salve to Prophet during a recent serious cancer bout, and infuses his latest, aptly named album Wake the Dead, comprising most of tonight’s set.“Jesus Was A Social Drinker” gives an early taste of Prophet’s sly, languid wit. Wake the Dead’s “Give the Boy a Kiss” then foregrounds the underlying tenderness of an album made with death in the wings, as he fears a woman, perhaps his wife and usual bandmate Stephanie Finch, turning to leave him “to wander for all eternity”. The Cumbia Shoes add widescreen twang, dub boom, hip-swaying swing, serpentine grooves and grit, for once making a weekend UK Americana gig feel like Saturday night.

“This is your old pal Chuck Prophet – I’m not here to bum anyone out,” the singer says, before making a case against casual gun ownership. “Killing Machine” then charts the murderous collision of a man buying a weapon “like paying for gum” and a young mother who “went out for a smoke/on a hot afternoon” over a mid-Sixties West Coast pop groove. “Sally Was A Cop” takes a still darker view of violence, crossing the border to Tecate, Mexico, where “the socialites and psychopaths are dancing with each other”. Introductory keyboards and pizzicato guitar are sorrowful and premonitory. “Thirty-five bodies lying in the highway/Children forced to dig the graves of their fathers,” Prophet sings, raising his arm as if in protest before making his electric guitar wail, as the organ takes a haunted highway cruise.

Certain Prophet songs chart America’s political shadow-side, from Green On Red’s bleak Reagan-era panoramas through Prophet’s upbringing in conservative Orange County in “Nixonland”, to his searingly funny kiss-off to Trump’s first term, “Get Off The Stage”. Such perspectives are lightly but unmistakably applied, and need no special emphasis days after Trump and Vance’s gangster shakedown of an ally in the Oval Office. “In the Shadows (for Elon)” does, though, imagine Musk as a lovelorn loner awaking in “a mansion like a tomb”. “At the time he seemed like a harmless fucking weirdo,” Prophet sighs. Current events are responded to with an extra chorus pioneered by Newcastle gig-goers, and enthusiastically taken up in Hassocks: “Elon Musk’s a wanker…”

Chuck Prophet and the rich brew of liberating music he represents need to be remembered as Trump desecrates his country. Hip to sweet kindness, loose style and weirdness, Prophet’s America has been embattled for most of his playing life, without ever being extinguished. “Sugar Into Water” suggests the alchemy at play in song and dance, and “Ford Econoline” hymns the classic tour van which has carried the singer on his way. By “You Did”, Prophet the lead guitarist is taking over, making his instrument talk in tongues.

During the encore, Prophet dedicates this gig to New York Dolls singer David Johansen, shortly after his death. He sings Green On Red’s “Time Ain’t Nothing”, about memories perishing even when you’re young, and ends with “Good Day To Be Alive”, an acoustic heartbreaker about what really counts. “It’s a good day to walk on water,” he sings. “Good day to swallow your pride/Good day to call your mother…” Good day to play a healing elixir of rock’n’roll too, tonight and always.

• Chuck Prophet's UK tour continues at Hare and Hounds, Birmingham (March 3), 1865, Southampton (March 4) and Garage, London (March 5)
• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk