overlap

The last two years have been noticeably leaner on the gigs front, largely due to changing financial circumstances but also because there just haven’t been that many gigs where I’ve felt I absolutely have to be there, and somewhere along the way I’m noticing that irresistible impulse to get to the gig has been supplanted by some of the other stuff I get up to. If you’d told me a few years ago that having spent the money on the ticket, just not going would ever be an option that appeared in some way reasonable, I’d have laughed.

I booked this ticket in a moment of celebration of returning to full time employment and via a blink and you’ll miss it tip-off on f*ceb**k that an extra handful of tickets had been made available. Which meant that as sober reality has returned and I’ve been weighing up what comes next, I’d even considered that if it were that popular a gig maybe I’d be better off reclaiming the cost of the ticket by flogging it on.

You’ll gather I wasn’t spectacularly keen, then, to see in his own right someone I saw back in the early summer, much as I was impressed with those two songs he did, but I lived to be very glad I made the effort.

Having the missus as your support act is an understandable move - it keeps Steve Earle behaving when he’s on tour, for example - but it’s also an invitation to moans of nepotism and worse. In this case there’s really no reason for any of that. Cathy Davey’s rich creamy voice is pitched somewhere between Cerys Matthews at her most breathy and Katell Keineg, and while it’s a tricky gig to accompany yourself on an electric guitar, it mostly works fairly well. There’s a bit too much voice as instrument stuff for my liking, but what do you expect from a voice sometimes fighting to be heard over an electric guitar? File under ‘I’d happily borrow the album off someone to get a proper listen but I’m not rushing out to spend the money on it myself’, and that’s as much a comment on my ageing and jaded attitude as it is on Cathy.

In bowler hat and suit, pipe in mouth and briefcase in hand, Neil Hannon cuts a striking figure as he strides on to the stage, tips his hat to the crowd and then spends ninety minutes combining piano pop literacy with frequent humorous asides towards a crowd nestled comfortably in the palm of his hand. I saw the amplified Divine Comedy band a while back and that reminded me how many great pop singles I knew, but this is just Neil and understandably it comes over as a far more singular act.

While some of the lines are clearly polished and practised, there’s still plenty of tiny surprises, just as when requests for My Lovely Horse are flatly refused with a repeated point blank ‘No!’, even to the point of protesting too much, as he goes into some other song. And then immediately follows that song with My Lovely Horse. The jaunty brightness of Becoming More Like Alfie is a particular highlight at the up tempo end of the scale, with his vocalising of the guitar solo and especially the hammering on section. Likewise the closest Hannon comes to overtly political in The Complete Banker is part anthem of despair and part call for insurrection.

There are plenty of moments of crowd involvement, with alternating male/female choruses of the Marseillaise fading in and out of The Frog Princess, and at times it’s the first time a gig I’ve been at has turned into something approaching a participatory choral event since whichever is the last I saw out of Chumbawamba, Show Of Hands and the Oysterband.

I’m delighted I overcame my poor excuse-making for an hour and a half of such outstanding entertainment, compelling from start to finish.