Venue:

Exmouth Pavilion

Date: 02/12/2023

Show of Hands, having decided to take an indefinite break from playing and touring together, wound up ‘Phase 1’ of their lap of honour selling out three nights at the Exmouth Pavilion. The venue has become the traditional local homecoming for the band at the end of their autumn tours in recent years, and it is always great to see the place packed out for the local heroes. It was bittersweet – the whole audience knew this may be the last time they will see SoH with the incomparable Miranda Sykes, so they savoured every moment of an evening that seemed to fly by far too quickly.

The first set consisted of the three either playing solo or in various duo combinations, whilst the second set was a triumphant run of some of their best known songs from their 30 odd years together. Miranda was visibly emotional towards the end of the show, and she graciously thanked Phil and Steve for the last twenty years when she has regularly played with them.

Show of Hands perhaps have never really had the recognition they deserved – whilst being very well known within what » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Palais, St Kilda Melbourne

Date: 02/12/2023

The Cruel Sea’s swampy grooved third album The Honeymoon Is Over was their most successful. After touring with his other 90’s band the Beast Of Bourbon earlier this year, Tex and the Cruel Sea are doing a 30 year anniversary tour, sans James Cruikshank who died of bowel cancer in 2015. Tex has lost a lot of weight and is much more mobile than in his other shows over the last few years. Opening was all girl band The Wraylettes were fun but would have been nice if the lead gtr had better chops if you’re gonna do Link Wray stuff. You can usually see them for free at inner citty pubs so this was a step up. TCS band were great with things lifting with Delivery Man and the audience rising with Black Stick. A mate reckoned Cruikshank was missed ( Matt Walker did his parts) but I didn’t notice. We were 3 rows from the front and while great for getting the stage energy you lose the whole band feel and the sound is too separate. 10-15 rows back is my sweet spot. Annoyingly Dan Rumour’s guitar amp wasn’t working » Continue Reading.

Venue:

‘The Longroom’ at The Queen’s Head in Box, near Bath

Date: 26/11/2023

On a cold, damp night in November, one warm and nourishing evening.

Very little in the realm of live music performance ever beats sitting 3 or 4 yards from the artist, listening in an intimately small space with the company of a small number of similar enthusiasts to music gently unfolding across a perfectly judged soundscape, neither too quiet nor too loud, and crystal clear in every detail.

As regards last night’s warm and cheerful event, sheltering from a cold, foggy, damp night in the run up to the turning of the year, I could have written here about the quirky venue, the little room at the back of the old pub on the high street of a linear village hanging off the coat-tails of Brunel’s railway and the nearby Georgian grandeur of Bath. I could have marvelled at the layout of the building, with doors off everywhere and rooms sprouting from rooms until you reach the fabled ‘Longroom’ where the action is. I could have riffed on the glitter-costumed splendour of the idiosyncratic eccentricity of the MC, with his Bono shades and his familiar » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Corporation, Sheffield

Date: 22/11/2023

Corporation Sheffield have certainly upped their game recently with their gig bookings. I didn’t imagine that an international guitar virtuoso like Uli Jon Roth, founder member of The Scorpions and pioneer of the Sky Guitar, would be gracing Sheffield with his presence, let alone in our dark corner of Milton Street. I was slightly disappointed that this now elder statesman of neoclassical metal had been appointed the Little Room (it’s smaller than the Main Room, and helpfully named!), usually reserved for smaller up-and-coming bands or tributes. But the former Scorp was at Corp, and who can argue with that. The band attempts to open the night with a lesser played instrumental number, Amadeus – they launch into the first few epic bars, but no-one can see a thing. The stage is being lit by 8 spotlights at the back, and nothing else. I wonder if this is for a dramatic, silhouette effect, but Uli quickly stops proceedings and asks to have some lights up, please – “It’s not a bat cave..!”. Lights up and bats banished, the Mozart-eque epic begins. Uli himself still looks every bit the hippy God of the 70s, in a » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford Upon Avon

Date: 03/11/2023

Just as natural as the weather; the band that calls itself Hejira.

We booked our seats for this about 6 months ago, just as they went on sale. Friends who booked a week or so later were nine rows behind us – the place had sold out fast. I’ve looked forward to hearing these songs played with the sort of musicianship and care they deserve ever since I bought our tickets, having been a Joni Mitchell fan since I first heard Big Yellow Taxi on the Light programme one weekend in 1970.

The set list was mostly made up of songs chosen from the four sides of Shadows & Light, the double live album that followed Joni’s album tribute to Mingus, possibly one of her least loved experiments. Before that, as Afterworders will mostly be aware, she’d had a run of completely staggering albums from Court & Spark through to Don Juan’s via Hejira. The fact that it is this last named LP that the band have chosen as their moniker says a lot – it’s laden with jewels. After Shadows & Light, she made a move to Geffen records » Continue Reading.

Venue:

St. Georges Glass Studio

Date: 13/10/2023

Friday evening, mid-October. Rough old day, full of wind and rain, and traffic warnings on the roads into town. Back’s been playing up again, and those placcy chairs in the upstairs room at St. G’s are murder for more than an hour or so. Coulda stayed at home and plundered iPlayer. Nearly did. So bloody glad I didn’t.

As regular readers of my reports will know, I’m something of a St. Georges groupie; the little Bristol venue makes up about 75% of my gig-going these days, as I’m a fan of sitting down and listening to the music at gigs, rather than wolfing down beer and talking bollocks with mates; that’s for the pub.

I often buy tickets for gigs there months ahead of time; if an interesting evening is listed in their schedule I’ll quite frequently just take a punt in the knowledge that their booking strategy is to book artists for whom sitting down and listening to the music is exactly what’s required. That’s not to say that jiggling about is frowned upon, or that it doesn’t happen, as recent experience with the Orchestra Baobab proved conclusively.

This gig, » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Union Chapel, Islington

Date: 12/10/2023

This was Thea Gilmore’s only band gig of the year and, she announced on social media and from the stage, her first since 2017. She was wrong about that. I saw her with a band in the same venue in 2019 on the Small World Turning tour. As we subsequently discovered that was the ‘divorce tour’. She and ex-husband Nigel Stonier shared a stage, although Thea had called time on a relationship which she had come to realise was abusive. It’s no wonder she has managed to let that one pass from memory.

She has played some completely solo gigs since, but it was still a brave choice to open the show by taking to the stage alone to perform This Girl is Taking Bets, possibly her best known song, in a radical new arrangement of loops and samples. The lyrics wrapped around the newer songs/spoken word pieces Niece Normal Woman and Friendly Little Heart Attack. In the ornate space of Union Chapel the effect was stunning and met with huge applause.

The rest of the show was heavily based around her latest, self-titled, and as yet unreleased, new album. Vinyl shortages are » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Upstairs on the Square, Richhill, Co Armagh

Date: 27/09/2023

In short: two dexterous acoustic guitar players on a 37-date UK and Ireland tour performing the music of John Renbourn (d. 2015) and doing so with passion, verve and brilliance, lightly worn.

Clive Carroll worked extensively with John on tours and on film soundtrack recordings. He displays great affection for the man and has fun tales to recount – indeed, it may not be entirely my imagination that the more Dariush retunes (many of the numbers being in fiendish altered tunings), the better the anecdotes become. Somehow, bafflingly, Clive is able to re-tune in a matter of seconds. While talking. Dariush is best known, perhaps, as a stunning interpreter of Bert Jansch’s music – Bert having been, of course, John’s guitar colleague in the Pentangle (1967¬–72) – and even stepped into Bert’s role within ‘Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle’ at a festival show in 2019.

Bar one event at a brewery in Scotland, the tour began in Ireland, north and south. I went to see the show at Rostrevor Folk Club on Monday 25 September, an hour’s drive from home (Belfast), and enjoyed it so much I drove to Richhill » Continue Reading.

Venue:

St. Georges, Bristol

Date: 06/09/2023

In Dakar last night, the temperature was slowly falling after a steamy day to a low of about 26 degrees overnight.

At St. Georges, in the middle of Bristol, the same evening started at a sultry 27 degrees, still holding by about 7:45 pm. But then, over the following nearly two hours, it shot up to what I estimated to be at least a sweltering 35 degrees. My T-shirt was soaked. Despite this thermogeddon, like everyone else around me, I found myself dancing, lost in the flowing, sinuous magic that enveloped me from the stage.

Hot? Sweaty? Legs aching? Sure. Absolutely bloody wonderful, joyous and life-affirming. After two months of feeling diminished and depleted by an unexpected illness, miraculously I finally felt ALIVE again. I couldn’t stop grinning. It made me so happy I nearly cried.

The source of all this personal and collective joy was a nine-piece band I’ve been keen to see play live since the day I bought ‘Great Moments In Vinyl History’, and then the mighty compilation known as ‘Pirates Choice’. The band was Orchestra Baobab, and like the rest of the grinning, dancing, clapping, smiling » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Various

Date: 11/08/2023

This started as some notes that would serve as a reminder of what I’d seen across 10 days at this years Edinburgh Fringe as you no longer have ticket stubs to remind you, and I thought I might as well fill it out a little and post it here. It’s something of a mammoth post – apologies if it’s too much but I thought it better to be a single review rather than split across several. I had a great time there, I hope some of the following is of interest to someone.

The best Ahir Shah – Ends : a few weeks before the festival Shah offered ticket holders a 1/3rd refund because he thought the show wasn’t fully ready. And then went on to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award with it. Inspired by watching “Goodness Gracious Me” with his grandparents, he packs an enormous amount into an hour. He weaves between the changing face of multiculturalism in the UK – “thrilled” that Sunak has become PM whilst being “politically furious”, and straight forward observational gags like discovering what his name means in Arabic. His reflections on the sacrifices made by his grandparents are » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Hammersmith Apollo

Date: 28/07/2023

Pulp are the greatest band of the 90’s IMHO. In fact probably my all time favourite so the chance to see them in a relatively smaller venue was too good to miss

They were magnificent. Played the hits but also the best of everything post 92, oldest song they played was Razzamatazz (and what a song that is) and they finished with Hymn to the North, a song I had never even heard before

Highlights for me were This is Hardcore and Glory Days from TIH, a great great underrated album. But to be honest as they reeled off song after great song, it’s hard to quibble with anything they played. We Love life is probably my least favourite of theirs from that period, but they played Weeds and Sunrise and both sounded bloody great.

Jarvis wouldn’t like the comparison I expect but he’s getting Mick Jagger esque, looking the same age and putting in the same stage moves as 30 years ago. He’s nearly 60, but looks same as before A brilliant frontman

Steve Mackey was missed from the band, he was such an integral piece, and they played a nice tribute » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Shepherd’s Bush Empire

Date: 23/07/2023

Jon Anderson singing my favourite Yes songs, backed by kids from a School of Rock?

One of my biggest musical regrets is that I never got to see Yes in their pomp. I have no idea why, other than you didn’t travel much to gigs in the ‘70’s, and they didn’t come to my town in the six years I was going to gigs every week.

I have seen Yes a few times in the past ten years but never with Jon’s voice singing those songs that I loved so much, at sixteen.

So, when this gig was advertised as Jon Anderson singing Close to the Edge, I really couldn’t have cared less who the other musicians were.

Let me give you a bit of background.

Jon began working with The Paul Green Rock Academy in 2005 when they played some U.S dates. The tour was a huge success and Jon apparently had the time of his life. Fast forward to 2021 and, amidst the complications of the pandemic, plans were set in place for a second tour, this time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yes’s best album, Close to the » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Roundhouse

Date: 17/07/2023

The long cancelled B&S gig from 2 years ago finally went ahead at the Roundhouse. I saw B&S at a much smaller venue last year and they were way better to my ears. A bit more ragged but played more of their album from last year and a bit more soul.

Last night they played what filled me with dread, a lot of “deep cuts”, lingo for “not playing your best songs” It’s not an old vs new thing either, I would have liked to have heard a lot more songs from last years A bit of Previous as that was their best album in years I thought. But alas only 1 song

Stuart Murdoch does seem to have a gap between what he thinks his best songs are and what they actually are. They could churn out a flawless set if they got rid of the landfill. Definitely underwhelming and won’t be seeing them again.. venue is great though I wish they’d bring back the real ales…

The audience:

Surprisingly young audience I thought, for what is basically a nearly 30 year old band

It made me think..

Venue:

Portland Arms, Cambridge

Date: 15/07/2023

I did something I don’t often do post-Covid, and went to a gig in a sweaty room at the back of a pub. I figured it wouldn’t be busy – the students were away for their summer break, it was a warm and dry evening so anyone with any sense would be sitting outside a pub by the river. Tickets were only a fiver and my pals Tape Runs Out were the middle of three acts, all three on their record label.

I arrived just in time to buy a pint of alco-free beer (tolerable) and catch Neev go on. She was fine but otherwise unremarkable.

Tape Runs Out are always good, any band with a hammered Dulcimer in the lineup gets my vote, wonky time signatures all the better. The FOH mix was a bit muffled and there was far too much reverb on the vocals, but they did fine.

I’ve somehow managed to miss Sunday Driver, who have been around the circuit for about 20 years (coincidentally, when I first had Offspring). Musically described (I found out later) as ‘Spaghetti Eastern’ they look a bit Steampunk – Victorian garb, a lead » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Soma Festival – St Malachy’s Church, Castlewellan

Date: 15/07/2023

Ten years ago, my pal Tíona started a festival in her back garden. It’s a large back garden, it’s in the deep countryside, but still… It soon became a week-long summer sensation held in multiple makeshift venues in the nearest small town, Castlewellan. Post-Covid, Tíona’s daughter Lorna took the reins to deliver a long-weekend 10th anniversary event. The highlight was a sensational billing of enigmatic Belfast troubadour Joshua Burnside and Irish trad legends Andy Irvine & Donal Lunny in St Malachy’s church – an elaborately decorated Catholic place.

I first saw Joshua five or six years ago at another small festival, in a tent. He was slightly shambolic but compelling. I bought an album afterwards – his first. It included his standout song, ‘Hollllogram’ [sic], though I found the production a bit annoying – fiddly and bitty rather than the open, woody, analogue sound of his live performance. I understand he likes fiddling around in his own studio with sounds. Earlier this year, at Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (CQAF), I saw his full-band show in a huge marquee – supported by Lemoncello, a similarly compelling act, whose singer/songwriter » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Hammersmith Odeon

Date: 09/07/2023

What a night at the old Hammy Odeon! Two of my all time favourite singers having the time of their lives in front of a great audience, mixed with fans of each and both artists. Daryl Hall’s ‘Live from Daryl’s House’ band were house-band for the night, with the addition of Mr. Casual himself, the wonderful Hall & Oates sax player, Charlie DeChant in his silver lame jacket and matching shoes.

Todd came on at 7.30 sharp to the opening bars of Real Man and it was clear from the off that the voice was in fine fettle. He let Shane play a faultless copy of THAT guitar solo and it was into Love of the Common Man, cementing my Back to the Bars experience from over 40 years ago at The Forum in London. A beautiful It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference and a playful We Gotta Get You A Woman led to Todd strapping on that famous green guitar and asking ‘Do you mind if I rock out a bit?’

The Todd fans around me roared their, (our,) approval.

He fluffed the first solo in Buffalo Grass, almost like he couldn’t hear » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The O2 London

Date: 19/06/2023

Peter Gabriel’s first tour for nine years rolled into London’s ‘enormodome’, The O2, on a hot, Monday night. Seventeen dates in Europe, plus Birmingham, had warmed up the band nicely, and you could tell that the new musicians had found their feet and their place in the rhythm of the band. It’s an eight-piece unit, this time out, with brass, strings and keyboards covered by the newbies. Amongst these, special mention has to go to the incredibly talented Londoner, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, a cellist and singer who has a voice to die for. The core of the band sees Tony Levin and David Rhodes command centre-stage in front of the wonderful French drummer, Manu Katche, a trio of consummate musicians who have given sterling service to Gabriel.

Peter has a new album cdue so it was obvious that we were going to get some unfamiliar songs – except that, these days, several album tracks get put onto the internet, so familiarity was not an issue. The set starts with the musicians assembling in a semi-circle around a fire, playing acoustically. First up is Washing the Water, from 1992’s Us, then Growing Up from 2002’s » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The Louisiana, Bristol

Date: 12/06/2023

A lovely sunny night in Bristol, so why not wander down near the waterfront and enjoy some delicious punk rock in a tiny venue?

First up was The Blunders. Last time I saw these they were performing ACAB – The Musical at a festival, it was late at night and I was a bit drunk and there was a man dressed as a cat onstage and it was all very confusing. No such shenanigans tonight, a straight ahead three piece gig. They look like old squatters, but the music is more post punk with a vague dancey feel. They probably wouldn’t thank me for saying this, but they put me in mind of a crustier and angrier Franz Ferdinand. They were brilliant, and they’re on the bill for the Culture Shock / RDF gig I’m going to in October so looking forward to that even more now.

Death Pill play next. The headline here is that they’re a Ukrainian riot grrl band who started this tour in Kyiv. Not sure I’ve ever seen so much goodwill directed towards a relatively unknown act before they’d even played a note. The show was about » Continue Reading.

Venue:

The London Palladium

Date: 03/06/2023

The house-lights were still going down when Bonnie and her band walked onto The Palladium stage and she seemed genuinely moved at the sight and sound which greeted her. A roar of delight from the audience that one of the best singers on the planet was back in town and a gasp from her that she had packed out this wonderful old theatre as she looked up at the third tier of adoring fans. “Look at you,” she said, waving up at the gods. I suspect the Gods were waving back.

Like a favourite comfort-blanket, the sound of the Bonnie Raitt band kicking into Made Up Mind just felt right. The Bros. Landreth song from her most recent album, Just Like That, is a perfect Bonnie-cover – a mid-tempo, bluesy stroll which allows for a little slide-guitar and some spot-on harmony vocals from the boys in the band.

It’s a new band, this year. Canadian, Glenn Patscha, from the band Ollabelle, is a revelation on keys, pumping that Hammond at every opportunity but also playing beautiful, delicate piano when required. On guitar is Boston’s Duke Levine, best known from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s band. » Continue Reading.

Venue:

Harpa, Reykjavik

Date: 28/05/2023

Never look a gift horse in the mouth they say. Well Costello announced a one off gig in Reykjavik – his first visit to Iceland in 13 years. My son lives there so was an opportunity to visit him and get to see this country’s current best songwriter (open to debate but you are wrong). Iceland on the cheap – a rarity as anyone who has been there will know. Anyway we rocked up at the magnificent Harpa in time to see a fantastic set by Nick Lowe (This country’s second best songwriter currently).His short set encompassed some of his best tunes ie. Long limbed girl, Lately I’ve let things slide but sadly no The beast in me. He was his usual affable, charming self and warmed us up nicely for what was to follow. EC and SN bounded onto the stage at just after 9pm and launched straight into Accidents will happen followed by Shot with his own gun. Nieve was majestic and Costellos voice was in fine fettle except on Veronica where he seemed to struggle a little. Most of the songs were played fairly straight except for When I was Cruel » Continue Reading.