Ben Marwood's Non-Christmas Party reviewed

Liz Crosthwaite • Published 16 Dec 2011 16:30 0 Comments

IT'S been some year for Club Velocity gigs at Rising Sun Arts Centre. Ben Marwood, Tom Williams and the Boat, The Jettes, Peers, Quiet Quiet Band… And on Sunday night - what was the penultimate RSAC gig until January 2012 - was up there with the best of them. On the bill for Ben Marwood's Non-Christmas Party were anti-folk singer with a recent and enchanting sideline in putting A.A. Milne rhymes to music, Chris T-T; Reading's best-loved singer-songwriter, and king of the singalong, Ben Marwood; and the rakish American charms of Franz Nicolay. I can't get enough of seeing Chris T-T live; each time he proves he's so much more than the lefty protest singer he's often labelled as, with deceptively simple songs that can capture you and take you on a strange kind of emotional rollercoaster during a gig.

Tonight, as he hopped between piano and guitar, Chris held the capacity-crowd rapt with the pitch-perfect and heart-warming Halfway Down, an almost unbearably honest A Box To Hide, the disconcerting yet beautiful Ankles, a traditionally raucous The Huntsman Comes A-Marchin' and the heart-wrenching, piano-led Tall Woman.

Ben Marwood, Reading's own angst-folk star, probably needs no introduction. And on Sunday, with his name above the door, he garnered an unusually 'respectful' response - with the crowd seemingly a little reticent about singing along to his bittersweet folk ditties... well, at first, at least. By the time he got around to Singalong all that was amended, and his set-list fixture cover of The Postal Service's District Sleeps Tonight closed his last gig of 2011 with a flourish.

Franz Nicolay only really popped up on my radar when he toured with Frank Turner earlier this year, and I'd somehow rolled up to this gig only having heard his banjo ballad This Is Not A Pipe. But no matter, for Franz, with his jaunty hat, accordion and half-drunk bottle of wine, with his kooky yet full-bodied voice and generally exurberant demeanour, grabbed attention from the minute he stepped behind the mic. With a sound somewhere between bluegrass, folk and gypsy punk, this Brooklyn troubadour took us on poetic journeys through darkened cities, with $100 dollars in our pockets and only the daylight and the horizon as our keepers...

A stellar gig to draw a year of stellar gigs (almost) to a close.

Tweet

This article appeared in Royal Borough Observer 16 Dec 11

Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our The Guide archives.

Follow @windsorobserver