Venue:

Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Road, London

Date: 22/02/2025

Inside No. 9 was known for its last minute twists, so maybe it’s not really a surprise that after reaching the end of of its 9th and final series there was an almost immediate announcement that Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton were to bring a stage show to the West End. Fans of the show will know to expect stories within stories, a lot of laughs and clever homage to classic comedy and horror.

If you’re already know the show you will also recognise a fan-favourite episode which is played out pretty much as broadcast, and acts as a framing device for the other plots within a portmanteau show. But the stage show is much more than a simple rerun of old ground. There is a loving tribute to the history of theatre and the ghost stories associated with it, with plenty of highly effective jump scares throw in. The live nature of the event is intrinsic to the flow of the script and it’s a performance which will only work if you are fortunate enough to be in the same room.

The show opens with the funniest instruction » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford Upon Avon

Date: 22/02/2025

The weather Gods have blessed us in this last week with a temperature rise from brass monkey zeros to a balmy – for Feb – 13 or 14 degrees. Any kind of physical exercise has gone from being a chilly thing to a sweaty thing.

So when venturing out for a Saturday night gig yesterday, the first of this year for us, it was nice not to have to wrap up in multiple winter layers. And, as I’d expected from a Kanda Bongo Man gig, not having an armful of heavy clothing to worry about was a very good thing indeed.

With an eight-strong band on stage, the evening kicked off with a short vocal performance from Kanda’s young female dancer and singer, decked out in vibrant African fashion and dancing on dangerously lethal looking stilettos. She was briefly introduced – I didn’t catch her name – and it would have helped those of us in the audience who have a less than fluent familiarity with any African languages to have been given some sort of clue about the gist of the song. I’d guess that she was, like » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Stables, Wavenden

Date: 12/02/2025

To the Stables to see Nick Lowe! Or, more correctly, Nick Lowe and Los Straightjackets. Our journey there was enlivened by a tyre blowout in a pothole which was fun but we limped home and started again in Car 2 and made it in time to miss the support and have a restorative glass of wine.

The Stables is one of my favourite venues – great sound, excellent facilities, decent leg room, good views from all seats. Tonight was no exception.

Nick bounded on looking dapper as ever in patterned cream shirt, chocolate brown slacks and suede loafers. How does he continue to look so good? Avuncular as ever, he welcomed us to the evening promising lots of songs both old and new, Hurrah!

Then it went weird. I had not seen him with Los Straightjackets and they bounded on to great cheers so I was clearly in a minority, but I found the masks thing very disturbing. Why would you want your backing band to look like members of The Joker’s gang or the serial killer from a Scandi drama? We didn’t like it at all and had we realised they were » Continue Reading.

Venue:

OVO Arena, Wembley

Date: 05/02/2025

Christopher Cross doesn’t visit the U.K too often these days, (2019 was the last time,) and that’s a shame. His music has endured over the 45 years since that all-conquering first album, (‘the green album,’ as he calls it; the one with the flamingo on the cover,) hauled in five Grammy awards and set the course of the genre of Yacht Rock through the ‘80’s, (as Toto guitarist, Steve Lukather, says later; “Where’s my fucking yacht?”)

Cross is a consummate guitarist, (Becker & Fagen asked him several times to be on Steely Dan albums, but he declined,) and his band reflects that, giving his arrangements a distinctly ‘Dan feel’ throughout the set. It is a four-piece band plus three female singers, with the star of the show being the drummer, French jazzer Francis Arnaud. Sounding like Porcaro, Keltner and current Dan drummer, Keith Carlock, all at the same time, I spent much of the 45 minute-set with my eyes glued to that left-hand jazz grip which always looks so classy when he is rolling around his impeccably-tuned kit.

The setlist is pulled from Cross’s first two albums, five of the nine songs coming » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Hamer Hall, Melbourne, Australia

Date: 29/01/2025

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have toured Australia 3 times in the last 21 years.The first time they travelled extensively in a van playing at smaller towns and venues as well as the capital cities. Second time they played bigger venues and with Willy Watson on the tour. This time they have played the top venues in Sydney – the Opera House and Hamer Hall in Melbourne, plush, classy venues. And they did 4 shows at the former and 5 at the latter. They are very popular down here. The crowds are almost fawning. Even though their records sometimes include additional instrumentation it was just them, a simple spotlight, their guitars, occasional banjo and the occasional addition of double bass compliments of Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers. So, in a big auditorium a lot rides on their songs, their delivery and their personalities. The show had 2 sets and for the first set I was often bored. Disclaimer here, at interval I complained they weren’t loud enough only to discover my hearing aids were turned off. So not only not assisting my hearing but undermining it! However, Mrs Wells had the » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Garage, Highbury Corner.

Date: 24/01/2025

Two years ago, at this venue, Josh Rouse performed his wonderful album, 1972, on its 20th anniversary. In 2025, it’s the turn of the follow up, Nashville. Both albums are packed with classics and tonight’s he’s playing Nashville in track order. His band has been with him for over 15 years and are all Spaniards – Rouse landed in Valencia when he fled a broken marriage in 2003 and ended up marrying Paz Suay from Valencia, where they have lived, on and off, ever since.

Any set which kicks off with It’s The Nighttime and Winter in the Hamptons has a fair chance of being a belter – those two would normally be part of the last 5 or 6 of his normal set – and the audience are singing and dancing along and we’re off to the races.

The wonderful Carolina reminds me that we’re only a Middle School Frown away from my favourite JR song, My Love Has Gone. When it starts I struggle to fight back the tears, it means that much to me. He has the incredible knack of making a lost-love song sound upbeat and as his » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Honiton Beehive

Date: 21/11/2024

I first discovered Christine Collister in the 80s via her collaborations with Clive Gregson, and always loved her stunning voice. She was also in Richard Thompson’s band for a few years, but her solo work rather passed me by. I was excited to find she was appearing at one our best local venues – the Honiton Beehive – and I then had a request to interview her for my radio show and I jumped at the opportunity. She was an absolutely delightful interviewee. Most of the chat was around her new album – ‘Children of the Sea’ – which is based around myths and legends of the Isle of Man, where she lives and was brought up. I highly recommend it – at the moment it is only available as a physical copy within a delightful hardback book with wonderful illustrations inspired by the songs and notes by Christine about the songs. It should be on streaming at some time soon, but I would grab the book and CD while they are available as there are only so many produced. I will post a link to Christine’s website for it.

Ticket sales for the » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm

Date: 20/11/2024

The singing-relationship between Eric D. Johnson and Anais Mitchell is something special. They are both on the half-turn, watching each other’s mouths to ensure that the phrasing of the harmony is pin-perfect. Both are constantly on the move, stepping back from the mics in between lines, Johnson all long hair, flapping shirt and dancing feet while Mitchell moves and dances like the music is an electrical feed directly into her body. She feels the music like no one else I know. By just the third song, we’re already at The Roving, the song which hooked me and many others when it was on a Mojo cover-CD in 2019, and Anais Mitchell comes into her own, doing that thing she does, standing on one precarious stiletto while her left leg is cocked behind her, like some blonde flamingo….in black leather pants*.

While the vocals, from all three of them, are the big feature of the band, it is Josh Kaufman’s guitar playing which steals the show. Like Buddy Miller, he is only ever looking to serve the song but, man, he can send shards of sound from that red Guild guitar, looking for » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Wilshire Music Centre, Bradford Upon Avon

Date: 08/11/2024

Last year I was lucky enough to join Sam Lee one evening in the woods of Gloucestershire, where we traipsed at midnight to a remote part of an RSPB reserve in search of singing Nightingales. Despite the drizzle and the reluctant avian peformers, it was a magical night. Sam always invites a visiting musician along to these sessions, and on the night I was there we had the company of Patrick Rimes from the band Calan. Around the campfire and in the woods, both solo and with Sam, he sang songs in Welsh in a fine baritone voice, and gave us rousing reels on his fiddle to drive away the cold and damp. I was very impressed, and vowed to try and see his band play live when the opportunity presented itself.

Last Friday that opportunity finally arose, and the Foxymobile took us in fine style to the the rather splendid little venue that is the Wiltshire Music Centre, half an hour from home, manned by volunteers for evening gigs, and a beacon of culture in an increasingly shadowy land.

Beth from Calan introduced the evening – and their » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Star Theatre, Singapore

Date: 05/11/2024

Not one for posting many reviews, but it looks like this a tour that most of the world will not be getting, so it may be of interest to one or two of you…..

Thom Yorke, has been embarking on a solo tour of NZ/Australia/ Singapore/Japan and hit the Star Theatre in SG on Tuesday evening. Titled “Everything” the tour is billed as “playing work from across his career” which with numerous Radiohead albums, three solo albums, soundtracks, The Smile and various other colloborations, gives him large canvas to choose from – looking at setlist.fm for concerts in NZ/Australia, he had played approx 45 different tracks across 8 concerts with 22 songs per set – certainly mixing it up.

And so to Singapore…. a basic stage set of a couple of banks of synthesisers / decks / sequencers / etc (between which Thom did his “dad dancing”) with large LED panels begins showing (distorted) images of himself mixed in with various patterns. Starting with “Eraser” and ending with “How To Disappear Completely” he mixed solo acoustic guitar, solo piano with electronic synth – those coming expecting an evening of melancholy would have been » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Salle Omnisports, Melrand, Departement du Morbihan, Brittany

Date: 29/06/2024

It has been a glorious summer’s day in the bosky heart of Brittany. Earlier in the day, there was a procession in costume up the lanes and streets to the market place by the church in Melrand, population 1500. It was all part of a weekend of events laid on by Les Bugales Melrand, a local association devoted to the safeguarding and promotion of Breton culture. Participation is part of the manifesto, and now it is evening, it is time for the ‘fest noz’. The association is celebrating 50 years. It’s going to be a big night.

A little of my history. I worked in Morbihan as a teenager, which led me to a niche taste for Breton folk music from an early age. I loved the music to listen to for its own sake. Thirty years later I had a Damascene conversion to the many strands of continental folk dance, and I suddenly found out what all this fabulous music was for. I put myself through a bootcamp of dance workshops, and now the music was for both my ears and my feet. This summer, for the first time » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Halls Wolverhampton

Date: 27/09/2024

You may notice there’s no The The in the photo. For his first tour in six years Matt Johnson spent his first minute onstage entreating the audience not to take any photos. It mostly worked, and despite checking my own desire for a souvenir snap I enjoyed not looking at the band through someone’s phone camera standing in front of me.

Next move was an object lesson in serving audience expectations around a storied back catalogue while also giving the new album its due. We got a set of two halves: the first half (‘the listening set’) being the entire new album played, the second half being the classics. Now why don’t more artists in a similar position do this. Artist gets everyone to listen to the new stuff without worrying that there won;t be enough time for This Is The Day or Infected.

Ensoulment sees Matt Johnson in a mellow, autumnal mood. Its twelve songs, immaculately played live, cover topics such as trump (Kissing The Ring of Potus), the death of his dad (Where Do we Go When We die) and online dating (Zen and the art of dating). Apart » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Toronto/Ottawa

Date: 13/09/2024

* 5 real gigs actually

1. Squeeze/The (English) Beat – Massey Hall, Toronto

The Beat or “The English Beat starring Dave Wakeling” were on first. An extremely short set punctuated by a near strike half way through Save It for Later as Dave was unhappy about a bright light shining in his eyes (“turn the f*ckin light off”). Not sure why nobody could have helped him with this, but it remained on throughout. A guy in front of me was ejected for boorish behaviour and there were too many covers played in a 7 song 35 minute set. A disappointment overall

In contrast, Squeeze were superb, playing everything you might want to hear (except Labelled with Love) brilliantly. I see them regular as clockwork every 15 years and this was easily the best show of the 3 I have seen.

2. Road Diary – Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto

Not a gig, but the world premiere of “Road Diary” at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). I secured a reasonably priced seat on the 4th row just hours before. A documentary about Bruce Springsteen and the E St Band mainly about the current tour but also containing » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Lexington, London

Date: 05/09/2024

I was only aware of Esther Rose in 2020 which was after she last played in the UK in 2019 so I’ve waited a long time for this opportunity. She didn’t disappoint. She clearly understands what an audience wants and made a point of playing a fairly even number of songs from each of her last three albums and a smattering of brand new ones from the yet to be released new album. There was a lot of inter song banter which means we learnt a little more about the songs. She played the first few songs sitting down then the rest standing which eased the straining to see! My main disappointment was that this is a solo tour. That’s fine but I do hope that next time she has a band because there’s a lot of fiddle on her recordings and I missed it. I can remember when visiting Americana acts just seemed to need to give Bobby Valentino a call!

The audience:

It’s interesting to see the wider age range than I’m used to at an Americana gig. Last week I saw Emily Nenni’s UK debut and that was the same (although » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, London N4

Date: 21/08/2024

Theatre reviews are few and far between, here on The Afterword, but having seen Amanda Abbington’s astonishing performance I feel compelled to recommend this play. It’s based on a real event, the rape of playwright Tawni O’Dell’s daughter. The rape is not reenacted, but happens offstage. The play is about the consequences of the rape on the family over the following years. The cast consists of just four actors, but as I have thought about it, I would suggest that it can be considered as an enhanced monologue. Tara, Abbington’s character, speaks about 75% of the script. The other cast members enable Tara’s part to move forward. They interact with Tara – they aren’t dumb ciphers – but essentially they are there to enhance the lead performance. But as portrayed by Amanda Abbington, what a mind blowing performance! Over the years I have seen some great performances at The Park (which is our local theatre): James Bolam in Bomber’s Moon, Anne Archer in The Trial Of Jane Fonda, Maureen Lipman in Dakota and David Haig in Pressure among them, but none of them compares to this tour de force. » Continue Reading.

Venue:

a farm, somewhere near Bristol

Date: 17/08/2024

ArcTanGent is a festival pretty much exclusively devoted to, ahem, difficult music. Lots of post-rock and post-metal and post-everything inbetween. It’s been on my radar for years, but always clashes with Beautiful Days, which has traditionally been our family festival outing. The line up there this year was so catastrophically bad however that I found myself with a free weekend, and then won a ticket to ATG in a competition. The stars are aligning I thought, it’s meant to be, and then a whole pile of dog related shenanigans meant Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were wiped out for me. Very disappointed to miss Explosions In The Sky and a few others, but Saturday had always looked to be the strongest day, and so, not to be deterred, I figured I’d get a day out at least. Mrs Dynamite (not that one) kindly offered to drop me off and pick me up, but drew the line at actually watching any of the bands, so away I went on my tod.

I arrived on site at 11am and was watching my first band within half an hour. Codex Serafini came on stage in » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Albany, Deptford.

Date: 03/08/2024

I had heard of the legendary creature Kitson, and most of these murmurings referred to his legendary comedic status, ultimate cleverness, indifference to the lure of television, and ability to deconstruct the genre* whilst remaining incredibly funny. People, they were right. The concept of the show (there are many interpretations, but this is the one I choose) revolves largely around an internal monologue, scripted, but delivered mostly by the audience (there were around two hundred and twenty speaking parts). We – the people – are given numbered scripts with our lines highlighted and when our turn comes we project as best we can whatever dialogue we are given (“I’m not making you say this, I’m enabling you to”). In turn, Kitson reacts (acts) as if responding in real time (“Some people only have one word to say” “Really?” “Yep”). I know, sounds awful doesn’t it? First hand, it was quite the cleverest (and don’t get me wrong – enormously funny) comedy experience I can remember. All of the tropes were explored, laughter effortlessly** generated, and – as a lunchtime show – we were all home in time for tea. Callbacks, jokes, puns and » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Sidmouth Folk Festival

Date: 04/08/2024

Folkies on here will know that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer have decided to put Show of Hands to one side and to explore other projects for w while.

It has now emerged that Steve has been working on this particular idea for the past year after conversations at Costa Festival with Eliza Marshall, the flautist from Ranagri, and Bennet Cerven, the fiddle player from The Trouble Notes, who he encountered at Glastonbury. Johnny Kalsi and Steve have been friends and occasional collaborators for some years, so the band came together to explore some new musical landscapes.

As Steve puts it “I am incredibly excited to introduce Dream in Colours to music lovers worldwide. Our fusion of trance, rhythmic beats, and world music grooves creates a sonic tapestry that invites audiences to let loose, embrace the rhythms, and celebrate together. With the exceptional talents of Bennett, Eliza, and Johnny, we aim to transport listeners on a rhythmic journey that sparks joy and connection.”

I did wonder how the band would be received, particularly at Sidmouth Folk Festival, which is very much at the traditional end of the folk festival world and where » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Patchwork Studios & Garrison Gallery, Maker, Torpoint, Cornwall PL10 1LA

Date: 11/07/2024

This review is, unavoidably, rather late in arriving on these pages. Preceded by being clobbered by Covid, and succeeded by a monstrous bout of post-Covid issues, it’s been brewing since the gig took place almost a month ago now.

Enough about your correspondent’s excuses. I wanted to report to you that a Katie Spencer gig is something you really do need to attend; she’s a fine talent and a lovely person. If you can find a gig of hers that’s close enough for you to reach, for goodness’ sake GO.

Nonetheless, happily Katie is still touring (when is she NOT touring!?) so a reminder here of her outstanding music is well worth writing up.

This was a gig that replaced her original south Devon booking at the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth. I’d bought tickets to that as soon as they went on sale. About a fortnight ahead of the gig I looked things up on the theatre website for a last minute check of performance times. Good job I did, as the gig was no longer listed! A phone call revealed that they’d cancelled » Continue Reading.