Roy Wood

Venue:

Worthing Assembly Halls

Date: 13/12/2016

We went to see Roy Wood almost on a whim, being familiar with the best known of his songs. At £29 per ticket, we had high hopes of a fun evening, almost certainly ending with “that” song, it being December. On the plus side, he had a full band with 4 x Sax players, plus the usual bass/drums/keyboards but it became clear very quickly that there was something very wrong with the sound. The support band (2 x electric acoustic guitars and keyboards had been fine but this was a stodgy wall of sludge with the saxophones, bass and drums way too high, drowning out Roy and the keyboards. There was a backing singer who seemed to be there to lighten the vocal load for Roy but unfortunately, she didn’t really add much, being a bit “pub singer”.
The band were all very competent and Roy’s voice seems not to have changed over the years but they were badly let down by the sound and using the venue’s very basic lighting rig didn’t add to the experience. They played all the crowd pleasing classics: Blackberry Way, Angel Fingers, See My Baby Jive, I Can Hear The Grass Grow, Fire Brigade, Ballpark Incident and I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day plus some rock and roll stuff to fill out the set list. Total time on stage was a contract fulfilling 75 minutes.

The audience:

Older than us, by quite a bit. These were people who probably saw The Move in the 60s.

It made me think..

Roy seems like a nice bloke and it was good to see him perform but I’m not sure how often I’d bother with this sort of gig again.

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