Dave Hause and Will Hoge Bring The Haunted Churches Tour To London’s Union Chapel

Written & Captured By | Morris Shamah

There’s a palpable sense of anxiety in the lyrics of both Dave Hause and Will Hoge, but on this Haunted Churches tour, they aren’t looking for peace so much as a peaceful place to be honestly in pain, communal or otherwise.

Will opens the show at Union Chapel with a 45 minute set of stories and songs, performed solo across acoustic guitar and piano. Will’s set starts personal, with humorous stories about being married to a therapist – introducing “The Last One To Go,” his ode to the sacrifice of outliving your partner, which was written after a particularly poorly spoken comment to his wife the evening before, as a song that won’t win him any awards, but it got him off the couch, so “in my mind it’s a hit.”

On record, Will Hoge’s music can be big and brash, but here, he is soft spoken, his Tennessee drawl giving his words both a heft and a lightness that seems to come with a particular kind of American experience. When he sings, he croons, his vocals filling the airy chapel with that very same dichotomy. His set quickly turns to social commentary, with his songs “End Of The World” and “Who’s God Is This?” both lamenting the current state of affairs in his home country of the United States. The latter starts off innocently enough, being a joyful take on the idea that every bar has an asshole patron, but turns at the end to reveal, to no one’s surprise, that this asshole is the God of the USA.

See more photos of Will Hoge HERE

Will’s set is surprisingly touching for an ‘opener.’ By the time his too-short time is up, the crowd’s defenses are worse for wear – Will’s open, soulful vulnerability has found the cracks in the mortar and wedged them open, just a little bit.

Dave Hause’s headlining set is all the better for it. Dave takes the stage to the strings overture of “chainsaw eyes,” from 2023’s Drive It Like It’s Stolen. He is accompanied by his younger brother Tim Hause on electric and acoustic guitars and Mark Masefield on piano, keyboards, and organs. Both are stage foils to Dave, Dave being a whirlwind of energy and banter, and Tim and Mark both responding with short, curt punchlines all throughout the evening. Dave’s banter is excellent, polished to the point where you wonder exactly how much of it is written and how much is improvised – but when enough of it is based on someone in the audience gifting him a box of biscuits you realize, no, he really is that good, playing off the hecklers and supporters in his audience, calling out for song requests and challenges, giving people nicknames.

See more photos of Dave Hause HERE

Dave’s set shortly turns heavy, with the one-two punch of “Gary” and “Pedal Down.” Gary, his prayer for the bullies and the bullied of his childhood , works beautifully as a precursor to Pedal Down, his apocalyptic take on modern day American anxieties. It’s here, when the hurt of the past begins to inform the pain of the current, that the set really starts to penetrate. He quickly follows that up with “Please Be Here,” an old love song from his punk band, The Loved Ones. He imbues this with pain, too, commenting how none of the song came true, and how the woman he wrote it for now how his house and all of his old records. “Fuck it,” he says, to end the introduction, “I have the song.”

It’s that very sense of reclaiming that this whole tour is about, Dave explains towards the end of the show. This Haunted Churches tour, played in old European churches as much as possible, exists to “reclaim these spaces with the things that we feel is connective” -emphasis on “we.” He goes on to say that he chooses to believe that churches were originally intended to be places for people to connect, “before it got all fucked up.” 

Connection is abundant here, as most punk gigs are, with sing-along choruses and crowd participation, and of course there is the  banter and the jokes. But beneath all that camaraderie, the show never shies away from the pain and anxiety that Dave, and Will before him, is trying to exorcise through song. Every sing-along is group therapy, every joke is self-defense. In one of the show’s hardest hitting sequences, Dave plays The Vulture, a standout track and the closer on his most recent record. The Vulture’s lyrics are obvious, a clear lamentation on seeing depression, but it’s Dave’s honest introduction, saying that he’s starting to see the worst parts of himself in his teenage children, that really hammers the anxiety home.

The show ends with a four song encore, in which Dave Hause brings back Will Hoge to share in the performance of Tom Petty’s “Learning To Fly.” It’s a masterstroke. Reimagined almost as a church hymn (that’s saved for the final song of the night, “Damn Personal,” played on only organ and vocals) this cover of the Americana classic is played softly, allowing the bold simplicity of Tom’s lyrical genius to capture the entire night perfectly:

“Well, some say life / will beat you down

Break your heart / steal your crown

So I started out / for God knows where

I guess I’ll know / when I get there”

 

Photos By | Morris Shamah