Eddie Reader 25/4/2017

The support was the excellent Adam Holmes who we had seen just two weeks before as a band member of the John McCusker band. This time it was just him on guitar and a keyboards player. It was a shame he was only on for half an hour. His songs sounded even better at second time of hearing. Eddie Reader came on with a five piece band supporting her, double bass, guitar x 2, accordion and keyboards. Notable were Boo Hewerdine on guitar and Alan Kelly on accordion . Boo was notable as a singer songwriter whose name I had first heard in March at the Edwina Hayes gig. The support act there were irritating but they majored on Boo Hewerdine songs and here was the man in person. Unfortunately he had only one featured song the superb 'The Man That I am' about forced child migration to Australia in the 50s. It was much better by him than at Chepstow! The other notable musician was Alan Kelly who was just very good. His skills were displayed particularly on a reel that he soloed on his fingers racing over the keyboard to great effect. I am not sure what I was expecting from Eddie Reader but the set was surprisingly diverse. There was some Celtic stuff but not much, there were a couple of Fairground Attraction songs which was to be expected, but there were also tributes to Ella Fitzgerald marking the 100th anniversary of her birth (which was that very day), a tribute to Amy Winehouse ('Losing Game') and she finished with 'Moon River'. Meanwhile the set also included more recent Eddie Reader songs such as 'Vagabond' and 'Pray the Devil Back to hell' (pretty much dedicated to Donald Trump!). there was even an off-the-cuff accapello Edith Piaf song. Her voice and singing were of course excellent but she also had a great stage presence - exuberant, funny, warm and confessional. You'd definitely want her as a party or dinner guest even if she couldn't sing. 2017 is working out as a year where I am seeing a lot of fairly low key artists who don't even sell out the halls they are in but are superb musicians continuing to tour their music and not resting on their reputations or back catalogues. I find I like that a lot more than the high-price big-venue scene that is the polar opposite. That is not to say that all the big names have stopped being creative or delivering fantastic gigs - Dave Gilmore and Neil Young certainly do both those things - but there is too much of it for my taste.