If Electric Ballroom had a marquee, on Tuesday night it would have spelt out Del Water Gap in bold capital letters. Known for working with artists such as Claud and Maggie Rogers, Brooklyn-based producer and songwriter Holden Jaffe started releasing his own music as Del Water Gap back in 2015.
Now, nearly a decade later, a pink neon horse with a bowl cut shines solo on stage as the fog slowly takes over, the crowd screaming in anticipation inside the sold-out Camden venue.
One at a time, three band members take the stage, each one of them ready to get the show going. Last, but definitely not least, Holden Jaffe, Del Water Gap himself, joins them as the audience’s excited roar fades into the lyrics of the night’s opening track ‘NFU’.
In a crescendo of elation, the first few songs are seamlessly played back-to-back until Jaffe takes a short break to grab his guitar, something that makes fans cheer even louder for what proves to be one of the night’s most anticipated tunes, ‘Better Than I Know Myself’.
Sporting an all-grey suit, Del Water Gap moves confidently across the stage, swaying and kicking his feet to the beat of the music in a David Byrnesque fashion. Whether he’s running from one end of the set to the other, or he’s jumping up and down in place, his energy spreads to the crowd even during his slower tracks.
When he last played a show in London, Jaffe had an audience of 200 people (most of which can also be spotted in tonight’s crowd). “My mom doesn’t really understand what I do. I told her I am playing a sold-out show in London tonight, and she finally understood, so thanks for being a part of my mom getting it today,”, he tells the crowd before introducing ‘Glitter & Honey’ later in the show – “On that note, we’re gonna play a song about having sex,”, he jokes.
And yet, the night’s truest full-circle moment was reached earlier on in the set when Del Water Gap introduced on stage a special guest. “During the pandemic, I was living in Maine, and I was losing my mind […] somewhere amidst the chaos, I found this artist [… who] became the soundtrack for some of the most horrible months of that year. A couple of months later, I was asked to open for that artist in LA”. The artist in question, Holly Humberstone, then joined Jaffe to perform their collaboration ‘Cigarettes & Wine’ only a few hours before its official release.
Never shying away from interacting with the crowd and giving insight into the behind-the-scenes of both his life and music, Del Water Gap has won a great audience for himself. In a time where live shows are, more often than not, lived through the pixelated screen of a smartphone, the sight of a roomful of people truly living in the moment adds an extra layer of coolness to a show that already was cool, to begin with. As the notes read: no phones in sight, this is lowkey crazy.
The last songs on the set follow one after the other in an upsurge of feverish chaos because, “Alright London, it’s time to wake the fuck up”. The energy in the room was reaching its climax, and, as if getting the crowd to jump and scream for you wasn’t enough, Jaffe threw himself into the audience. ‘Perfume’, ‘All We Ever Do Is Talk’, and ‘Coping On Unemployment’, one after the other bring out more and more of the fans’ screams. It’s at the very end of the closing song of the night, ‘Ode To A Conversation Stuck In Your Throat’, that the stamina is running so indubitably high that Jaffe is climbing the stage rigging, hanging off the lights above the first rows of fans one-handed, dangling and kicking his feet so excitedly that it’s hard to tell whether he’s about to dive into the crowd or fall back onto the stage.
An album titled “After something that my grandpa wrote in a letter to my grandma”, ‘I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet’ perfectly encapsulates the spirit of Del Water Gap’s latest London show – a triumph that definitely won’t be his last.
Written by Benns Borgese // photography by Amanda Laferriere
GEM Magazine 