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Ghost Story: Toria Wooff’s Somewhat Gothic Christmas Live in Manchester

December 21, 2025 / Mike / 0 Comments

Wednesday 17th December 2025

Gullivers, Manchester, England

“Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Robert Burns, ‘Auld Lang Syne’

“And you ask: will I write, with you firmly in my mind?”
Toria Wooff, ‘Song for A’

The night begins with a ghost story. As the lights dim to deep shadow in the small, close ballroom above Gullivers bar in Manchester, precise, unhurried footsteps rap against the wooden floor. The Librarian of Weeping Bank is walking down the aisle between the rows of the hushed audience towards the stage. With his long, beak-like nose and distinguished hairline, dressed conservatively in a sweater vest with a large, leather-bound ledger tucked under his arm, the Librarian certainly looks the part, like a teacher or lecturer straight out of central casting. He takes a seat, opens the ledger and begins to read.

It’s all a wonderful bit of theatre as, over the next half-hour, this curator of the stories of Weeping Bank Library delivers one of those stories with the assurance of a thespian. The performance is a well-balanced one, with tasteful sound effects accompanying the Librarian’s tale; nothing excessive or cinematic, merely the occasional footstep, breath of howling wind or creaking floorboard to accentuate the mood.

For those of us seated in the front row, the shuffling of the audience behind adds even more, for it feels as though something may well be creeping up behind us. This is the Gothic style in full effect; using mood and ambience and vocabulary to ratchet up the tension of the ghost story itself – that of a babysitter who is left alone with a child in a house on the wrong side of the Weeping Bank. Or has she, as she perhaps discovers, been left alone with two?

It’s an unconventional way to begin a night of live music, but one thing (among many) that I have come to admire in a Toria Wooff concert is their singular nature. Tonight is the fifth time I’ve seen Toria live since I came across her remarkable debut album back in May, and on each occasion different songs have come to the fore and made their impression upon the night. It could be that the folk melody of ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ grabs you; on another night it might be the soaring vulnerability of ‘See Things Through’ or ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ which stand as the centrepiece. To see someone live five times in eight months and still find new things to uncover on each occasion is testament to both the stable of songs and the creative momentum the artist is quietly building.

And tonight is, in many ways, the most impressive Toria Wooff performance yet. Almost a year to the day since her first billed ‘Somewhat Gothic Christmas’, at a venue within spitting distance on the other side of the road, Toria pulls out all the stops to ensure there are no lumps of coal in our stockings this year; that this will be a night to remember. Many of the finest songs from her album are played impeccably tonight by her and her on-stage companion, the cellist Polly Virr, and we’re also treated to some unreleased songs from her upcoming second album, including the haunting ‘House on the Hill’, a song which takes your breath away with its immaculate, bracing air.

If that were not enough, Toria also proves, later in the night, to be one of the rare musicians who can sing the hell out of a Christmas song. There’s something about the festive period that encourages ghost stories, whether that’s the long, cold winter nights or the Victorian shadow of many of our present traditions – including the Ghost of Christmas Past from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – and Toria Wooff’s ethereal Gothic folk stylings are perfectly suited to evoke it. One hopes that her Somewhat Gothic Christmases in years yet to come will prove, by word of mouth, to be a regular and hotly-anticipated fixture on the Manchester calendar. They certainly will be on mine.

After opener Natalie Wildgoose has followed the Librarian by providing a half-dozen haunting, piano-driven laments of her own – a stark, almost avant-garde reimagination of English moorland folk – Toria Wooff takes to the stage carrying her new, custom-made Native Series acoustic guitar, accompanied by Polly and her cello. With her new guitar of English yew, she decides immediately to ring in the new, opening with the unreleased demoniac interlude ‘Black Shuck’ and ‘The Morrigan’, both of which are expected on her upcoming album in 2026.

It’s the first time I’ve heard ‘The Morrigan’, which takes the legend of a mythological Celtic goddess-queen and – ingeniously, as Toria has also done on her unreleased songs ‘House on the Hill’ and ‘The Bargain’ – universalises it. Part of its melody recalls her song ‘The Flood’, but ‘The Morrigan’ is very much its own creature. Polly’s touches on the cello are almost a second voice, a call-and-response with Toria’s own confident, hauntingly clear vocals. “I cannot wait for what she offers,” Toria sings on the unreleased song. Truer words were never spoken.

It’s a bold opening, and Toria follows it up with ‘Estuaries’, a soft, pensive song that I am used to hearing later in her live sets (no doubt due to its lyric “then you leave without saying goodbye”). Its presence here so early in the night not only speaks to the dexterity of her growing catalogue of songs, but also suggests Toria has something special planned for the end of her set.

‘Estuaries’ is followed by ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, which in its album cut is a full-band, steel-laden number which I’d recommend to new listeners looking for a rewarding dose of folk Americana. Tonight, with Toria’s new custom tonewood accompanied only by Polly’s resonant cello, the song is stark and wounded, and afterwards we’re given some insight into why.

“You’re all very quiet,” Toria says teasingly, in her thick, warm Bolton accent. “There’s something about being seated that makes people quiet, I think.” She tells us that she wrote ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, and the next two songs she is about to play, about her best friend Alicia. “On the topic of being quiet in this room… erm, we never were.” The crowd chuckles warmly. Gullivers bar, here in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, was “one of our haunts.” She gestures towards the back of the room. “That little, like… where it dips in the little alcove there – we used to stand there because we knew we could get away with being as disruptive as possible.”

Astute readers will notice the past tense, and this isn’t because it’s a mere act of reminiscence on Toria’s part. Alicia is indeed no longer with us, and it’s clear that Toria – who dedicated her self-titled album to her, forever linking their names together – is deeply affected by her loss to cancer five years ago. In light of this, the battling sorrow of ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ – and other songs to come tonight – becomes even more apparent. “And all the bars that we had haunted,” she sang in ‘Lefty’. “I couldn’t go back even if I tried.”

There follows some of the most delicate, vulnerable moments of the night, as Toria navigates her way through two more songs inspired by Alicia: ‘Sweet William’ (“I remember your skin and how we fed it to the clay”) and ‘Song for A’ (“You call me up, haul me out, say you ain’t got much time left now”). ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, the signature song that follows in their wake, may be more recognisable as a ghost story, but it is increasingly clear what ghost lingers in many of Toria’s other songs. When I remarked earlier that different songs come to the fore each time I hear Toria live, well, tonight it is the lyricism which impresses deeply – across every song.

It should be noted, at this point, that Toria Wooff is no maudlin artist. If there is a melancholy to some of her songs, it is a sadness that she has diverted, as one might a river, towards art and creation rather than bitterness and gloom. It is a hurt that inspires rather than kills a buzz. What is more, Toria allows us a release with her easy charm and humour. After another song that must surely be about Alicia, the unreleased ‘Noiselessly’ (“there’s a part of me that died when you did too… I think we’re tangled up together on every plane”), she thanks the audience for their applause. “When you like it,” she says, “it means it makes the album. It doesn’t get cut last minute.” Introducing ‘Aleister’ at this moment, another impressive unreleased song, she begins to tell us what it’s about. But there comes a noise from the back of the room, something heavy dropped on the floor with a thud louder than any of the Weeping Bank Library’s sound effects.“It doesn’t matter actually,” she laughs.

And even were the spectre of her friend not resting quietly on every song, there would still be moments that would mark the night as special. On a normal night, ‘The Flood’, which follows ‘Aleister’, would be a stand-out moment. Enthusiastic applause greets the end of a song which has threatened to burst its banks, with increasingly insistent guitar-picking from Toria and some inspired cello flourishes from Polly.

“Let’s do a poll,” Toria says, as always a warm presence on the stage. “Are you feeling more festive… or spooky?”

“Right, so shout for ‘spooky’.” There are some woos from the audience, and Toria laughs at the hesitancy. “Festive?” she asks, before bursting into laughter at the response. “That was even more hesitant!” she grins.

The ‘spooky’ option having won (for now), Toria and Polly decide to play ‘House on the Hill’, an unreleased song inspired by her “favourite book”, Susan Hill’s 1983 Gothic pastiche The Woman in Black. It’s a truly special song, one of those that just seems perfectly balanced in your mind as you hear it, and it has that feel of being the sort of song that might see this talented artist break out onto higher ground of her own. I’ve taken to referring to Toria as ‘The Woman in Black’ in my previous reviews, something which Toria tells me after the show – as usual, she generously grants her time to fans afterwards – had left her buzzing when she read it.

It’s a moniker that fits her like a glove, and not one I can claim credit for, because it’s one that Toria has earned with her own talent and blossoming creativity – as the unreleased ‘House on the Hill’ has just shown. She has embraced this Gothic folk sound and aesthetic in the last couple of years, to the point where her older material (such as a 2021 single called ‘June’, a 2019 cover of Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, the Badlands EP also from 2019) is either hard or outright impossible to find and listen to, even if the music that can still be sourced in some forgotten places, such as the wonderful 2021 single ‘James Edward’, is compelling to hear.

But one cannot blame her for leaving her old music behind – even as she ensures she carries the memory of old friends with her – for this new Woman in Black may well be on the cusp of something special. “We had a big gab about [Susan Hill’s novel] in the green-room,” Toria tells the audience. “And about the 1989 [television] version of it, which is just incredible. And during that chat, I realised the moment that I must have just decided where my path led in life. When I first saw HER stood in the graveyard like that” – she mimes the disturbing, rigid pose of Jennet Humfrye – “I was like: ‘THAT’S who I want to be.’ That’s a great realisation to bring in to 2026,” she laughs.

But before the New Year, and the exciting (“but stressful”) new album release that is sure to come, there is still a Christmas to celebrate – and celebrate somewhat Gothically. ‘House on the Hill’ is followed the effortlessly pleasant chords of ‘That’s What Falling in Love Will Do’. The song is marked by some electrical distortion in the speaker at Toria’s feet, and I find myself wondering if perhaps a mischievous ghost has moved from the alcove to be as disruptive as possible once again in this old haunt.

In support of this theory, the distortion stops as soon as Toria acknowledges it and smiles to Polly, and we move towards the final songs of the night. ‘See Things Through’ is one of Toria’s most remarkable productions, in which she confesses to not knowing whether she’s strong enough to ‘see things through’ even as the strength of the song and the soaring music proves that she is. The beautiful release of Polly’s cello as the song crescendos is one of the moments that I’ve come to anticipate each and every time I’ve heard the two musicians live on stage.

“I have one more song for you guys,” Toria says as she takes in the applause. “And it’s a very important song to me. When I was trying to pick a festive Christmas song, I really wanted to think about something that encapsulated what the true meaning of Christmas is. The most important thing about Christmas. And that is: The Muppets.”

The audience laughs as Toria moves to a black metal lectern at the side of the stage and shuffles through a flurry of sheet music. Her eyes light up as she finds what she’s looking for. She picks up the lectern – “Very precarious” – and places it in front of her at centre stage.

“OK. So this is genuinely what I think is the best Christmas song ever written. Maybe the best song ever written, actually.

“And it’s sung by Michael Caine, in his finest role. It’s called ‘Thankful Heart’. And there’s a little call-and-response. If you do know it, feel free to join in.”

What follows is a sweet and gentle rendition of the Muppets song, with Toria’s voice the purest I’ve ever heard it, innocent and childlike while deftly avoiding even the hint of twee or festive syrup. Polly smiles warmly, her cello itself almost a call-and-response to Toria’s singing. As absurd as it may sound to anyone who is not here to experience it, Toria is not wrong in believing this captures the spirit of Christmas. Her breathless melody “with a thankful heart” reminds everyone in the room of the warmth of the winter season, a glow that comes from sharing life with other people that we all accepted intuitively as children but forget as we grow older. This serene joy does not banish or conquer the sadness which Toria has acknowledged in other songs tonight, but instead shows how light can exist alongside darkness; how they are not even two sides of the same coin but exist in one permeable area, like rain falling into the ocean, and only by embracing both can you find a way forward. Toria can sing of her loss and her pain even as she can sing, now, of “how precious life can be” and how “even if we part, I will hold you close with a thankful heart.”

The audience, hushed throughout, breaks into deserved applause at the song’s end. The applause continues as Toria leaves the stage and morphs into shouts for an encore. Toria obligingly returns to rejoin Polly and jokes, “We’re going to do the whole of The Muppets. I’ll be Michael Caine.”

Instead, she shuffles through the sheet music again and places a piece of paper on the lectern. “Right, ok. We’re going to do a little singalong. It’s not going to be fun and cheery – it’s a Robert Burns poem. I think it’s actually a funeral song. And it’s technically not a Christmas song either – it’s a New Year’s song. So have a little sing together. You guys can sing the chorus with me.”

What follows stuns those of us in the audience so much that we all forget to sing along. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a song so ubiquitous at this time of year that we can often forget the latent power of it – but not tonight. On a night of timeless folk music penned almost exclusively by herself, this is the perfect capstone: Toria Wooff playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as though it were written just yesterday, pulled from fresh soil.

Toria’s own heartache and loss finds expression in the song, and when she sings “And surely you will buy a pint, and surely I’ll buy mine; We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne”, we know whose name puts power behind it. In ‘Thankful Heart’, Toria sang of how “if you need to know the measure of a man, you simply count his friends,” but in ‘Auld Lang Syne’ she shows that friendship is not measured only in number but in depth, and if Alicia experienced this quality of friendship and love from such a remarkable artist, she must have been a blessèd lady indeed, for all her woe.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? I debate whether I should even write any of this, for it is not my story to share. But I have witnessed an artist with emotional bravery tonight, and at moments, watching her closely on the stage, it has been as though Toria might waver, that the gestures to the alcove at the back of the room, or ‘Song for A’ and ‘Sweet William’ reverberating from the walls of their old haunt, might be too much to bear.

But her performance tonight, her decision to turn pain and loss into art and beauty, is worth noting for posterity. For Toria seems to know – intuitively, if not consciously – that the ghost story she carries along with her is not a curse. In true Gothic fashion, the darkness is a harbour; not only a place of shelter for the memories of Christmas Past but a place for the Ghosts of Christmases Yet to Come to gather and find their path forward.

Toria’s performance tonight is not merely admirable, but the epitome of true artistic expression: to roll back Death, even while inviting one’s ghosts inside and making peace with them. This Woman in Black bears her loss far less malevolently than the one of Susan Hill’s creation, choosing instead to respond to hardship with life and increasingly impressive art – sweet Williams planted in black and tilled soil.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Tonight, Toria Wooff has given Rabbie Burns’ rhetorical question a definitive answer.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)

Black Shuck (unreleased)
The Morrigan (unreleased)
Estuaries
Lefty’s Motel Room
Sweet William
Song for A
The Waltz of Winter Hey
Noiselessly (unreleased)
Aleister (unreleased)
The Flood
House on the Hill (unreleased)
That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
See Things Through
Thankful Heart (Paul Williams) (unreleased)
Encore: Auld Lang Syne (Robert Burns/Traditional) (unreleased)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

The Warmth of Oblivion: Edith Pageaud Live in Manchester

December 14, 2025 / Mike / 0 Comments

Tuesday 9th December 2025

Hallé at St. Michael’s, Manchester, England

The passage to oblivion is, in some ways, uneventful. No sooner have I arrived at St. Michael’s – a converted 19th-century Catholic church now serving as one of the smaller event halls owned by the Hallé Orchestra – than I am through its rustic, unattended front door and taking a seat in the third row. The evening is dark but it is even darker inside, the lights dim and close in both the foyer and the main hall where the audience begins to congregate. The most prominent light is the warm orange emitting from the stagelights, beneath which a single chair stands empty and anticipating.

There are still a couple of seats free in the front row, but I make no attempt to move towards them. For in truth, I feel like a bit of an imposter here. Two men seated behind me talk freely about the classical pieces they hope to hear tonight, including Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’, and while I’ve heard tonight’s artist play the song on one of the YouTube videos that first drew me to her music, I’m not sure I’d have the ear to pick it out, let alone opine on the nuances of its various performances the way those within earshot of me do so tonight.

This is my first concert of classical music, and one which I have attended on a whim. The algorithm – which, for all its sins, is wont to do this from time to time – had just a few weeks earlier shown me some videos of Edith Pageaud playing a classical guitar – beautiful, restful music amongst beautiful, restful settings. It was serendipitous that she would shortly be visiting my city, and I decided to attend. I was slightly daunted, however, because for the last few years I have been in the habit of writing reviews of each concert I attend, and I knew that I would have to either break with this habit or risk offering valueless comments on a form of music that I know even less about than the country, roots and rock music I usually write about.

Happily, I find in Edith Pageaud tonight a gentle and willing teacher. Dressed in a charming black evening gown with a black ruff around her neck to keep out the cold of the North of England in December, the strikingly beautiful young Frenchwoman takes her seat under the warm orange stagelight and drapes a black cloth across her lap. Resting her classical guitar against the cloth, she begins to play, her red hair falling over her face.

Over the next seventy-five minutes, Edith performs – but also teaches. With an engaging light humour delivered in a sweet and strong French accent (though in impeccable English), she introduces each of the pieces she plays with a comment or two on its provenance, syncopation or arrangement, such as how a piece originally written for the cello, which with its bow can easily glide across various notes, is rearranged for guitare classique by the use of tremolo, a sequence of rapid notes on the guitar which Edith then deploys masterfully on the music in question. She highlights some of the nuances of the pieces to watch out for before she plays them, and in this way she bridges the vast gap between my shallow pool of knowledge of classical guitar music and my deep enjoyment of it tonight.

I make the decision early on that I cannot adequately chronicle the night: not only had the promoter politely requested no photography but, more importantly, I lack sufficient knowledge of the music for any notes I would make on my phone worthwhile. Indeed, I take out my phone only once – to make sure it is on silent. To interact with it any more on a night of such refined and cerebral music seems like sacrilege.

It means that the short night passes by as some sort of fever dream. My recollections lack substance, at least for the purposes of a useful review, and the setlist I include at the bottom of this page is an incomplete hodgepodge of the official programme for the night and some other specific pieces I recall hearing.

But it does mean that I do become more involved in the night itself. Free of my self-imposed desire to make my own notes, to record and write and diarise, I surrender to the notes of Edith Pageaud’s guitar, and the silence between those notes. As Edith’s hands move across the neck and body of her guitar, ceaselessly weaving the night, I am privileged to hear arrangements of Schubert and Philip Glass and the Spanish guitars of the Argentines.

Some are arrangements created by others and played amply by Edith; Scarlatti’s ‘Sonata K. 466’ and Messiaen’s ‘Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus’ being especial highlights. Others are arrangements made by Edith herself, such as her impressive guitar arrangement of Rachmaninov’s ‘Prélude in C-Sharp Minor’ and Biber’s ‘Passacaglia’, which was the first arresting song I heard from Edith online and which drew me here tonight.

And there is, of course, Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’. I don’t know what the two men behind me make of it, or how it compares to the other times they’ve heard the piece. I myself cannot comment on its nuances, beyond what Edith herself generously highlighted to me and the rest of the audience before she began to play.

But I also learn that it does not matter. For all that this music is a cerebral force, requiring patience, application and an appreciation of quietude from its listeners, it is also music that, in the capable hands of Edith Pageaud, I can allow to just flow over me without thought or worry. Music is the universal language, the oldest one we know. The ancient cavemen of Lascaux would be moved by this music, were they able to be here tonight, just as my own uncultured mind can travel through the chords and be soothed without any of the more nuanced appreciation possessed by other attendees tonight.

Music runs deep, oblivious to the barriers we place with theory and culture and thought. And music is not just heard or seen, but felt; in light, in atmosphere and circumstance. As Edith Pageaud sits on the stage against a curtain of royal blue, beautiful and concentrating on the notes of ‘Oblivion’ she plays on her guitar beneath the warm orange stagelight, I can sink, thoughtless, into the warmth of oblivion and be moved by the music that resounds there.

Setlist:

Glassworks: 1. Opening (Philip Glass, arr. Vladan Miladinovic)
Introduction et Rondo Brillant (Johann Kaspar Mertz)
Zer Guten Nacht, D. 903 (Franz Schubert, arr. Edith Pageaud)
Aufenthalt (Schubert, arr. Mertz)
Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (Olivier Messiaen, arr. Matias Tozzola)
Passacaglia (Heinrich Biber, arr. Pageaud)
Prélude in C-Sharp Minor (Sergei Rachmaninov, arr. Pageaud)
Étude Op. 8 No. 12 (Alexander Scriabin, arr. Pageaud)
Sonata K. 24 (Carlos Seixas)
Sonata K. 466 (Domenico Scarlatti)
Oblivion (Astor Piazzolla, arr. Roland Dyens)
El Bien Perdido (Atahualpa Yupanqui)
Los Caujaritos (Ignacio Figueredo)
Passacaille (Alexandre Tansman)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

A Cuckoo in the Nest: Listening to Sierra Ferrell Live in Manchester

December 7, 2025 / Mike / 0 Comments

Wednesday 3rd December 2025

Co-Op Live, Manchester, England

Towards the end of her short opening set, Sierra Ferrell invites Marcus Mumford and Ben Lovett out onto the stage to join her and her band. “That’s what we’re here for,” says a runty man stood in the crowd behind me, and no doubt he speaks, albeit too rudely, for many of the 20,000 people here who have filtered into the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester to hear Mumford and Sons, tonight’s headliners.

But he doesn’t speak for me. I wager there are a few others like me, scattered throughout the arena like cuckoos in the nest, who have made their way here tonight with the sole desire to hear Miss Sierra sing. I last heard her live in June of 2022, a short pilgrimage over to Liverpool to witness this small wonder of the modern world; it was so wondrous an experience that it moved me to write for the first time about music, in a review I wrote of the night. It’s a habit I’ve continued, for forty gigs since that night at the Future Yard in Birkenhead, but with no opportunity to write again about Sierra. Aside from a few festival appearances, this is the first time she’s returned to English shores, and I decide that even if it’s as an opener rather than a deserved headliner, I’m going to savour every moment. It has been, you could say, a long time coming.

More than three years after she cast her pretty magic spell in Birkenhead, Sierra Ferrell now appears on the stage in Manchester, an apparition in a fetching purple Victorian dress and matching vintage hat, looking like she is about to walk into 221b Baker Street to enquire about the services of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Sierra’s costuming eccentricities have become a key feature of her live shows; the last time I saw her, her hair was bedight with flowers, but tonight the flowers are confined to a large, vivid bouquet placed before her on the stage.

Preceding Sierra’s arrival are the five men of her band, all in matching white patterned shirts and black neckties, looking for all the world like an old-timey country band. On Sierra’s right, closest to my side of the stage where I view from near the front of the pit, Oliver Bates Craven sets himself with fiddle in hand. He’ll also switch to electric guitar at some points in the band’s set. Behind him, Matty Meyer is seated on the drums, next to Geoff Saunders on bass (both electric and upright). On the other side – next to an oversized bass drum which looms like Chekhov’s gun, ‘Heavy Petal Music’ written in large yellow letters on the drumskin – Mike Robinson fills in on acoustic guitar, banjo, dobro and pedal steel. Before him, Joshua Rilko – who, like Oliver and Geoff, is a familiar face by Sierra’s side – carries a mandolin. Completing the old-timey look, all five men are in white hats, aside from Joshua in black.

For their first number, Sierra joins Oliver’s fiddle with one of her own, leading the introductory notes of ‘I Could Drive You Crazy’ as Geoff runs a bow across his upright bass. Sierra Ferrell begins to sing – a sentence I’ve been waiting to write again for more than three years – her voice coming in high and strong and pure. I realise that for many of the people here tonight, this will be the first time they’ve heard that voice. While we’re only treated to nine songs from Sierra tonight, we’re blessed for each and every one of them.

This triumphant opener is followed by ‘Jeremiah’, one of Sierra’s signature songs and an opportunity for the band to really find their groove. Joshua moves to banjo and Mike bends some notes on a dobro, Sierra spinning carefree in a circle as they play. She’s a star in the making, as natural and at ease in this arena of 20,000 as she was in front of the few hundred at the Future Yard in 2022. It’s in this song that I make my peace with Sierra only being an opening act tonight; this is her crowd, for these nine songs, and she glides through it all with us in the palm of her hand.

‘Jeremiah’ is followed by ‘Bells of Every Chapel’, its title announced lustily by Sierra, with Mike switching to pedal steel to give yet more authentic country feel to the band’s sound. But despite their look and the instruments they have to hand, Sierra Ferrell and her band are no hidebound purists or retro tricksters. They prove this in their next song, with the drum patter and dirty electric guitar of ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’ a cool change of pace that surely slays any remaining sceptics among the mainstream Mumford fans tonight that this is a gal to reckon with.

Joshua’s mandolin begins the next song, ‘Years’, the only song tonight that isn’t penned by Sierra herself. It’s a cover of a John Anderson song that Sierra has made her own since she recorded it for a tribute album a few years ago. It suits her voice perfectly as, sans instrument, she picks up the microphone and strolls to the front of the stage to sing. She gestures tears from her eyes and dances snakily to the lyric “like the wind”, but as with all things Sierra it’s the vocal performance which is the most impressive. With harmonies from the men in the band, Sierra’s voice fills the arena – something it feels like it has always been destined to do. Her haunting woos resound as the song draws to a close and the lights go out to a rising applause.

Next up, a real boon for the cuckoos in this nest as we are treated to an unreleased song that Sierra, back behind her acoustic guitar, announces as ‘Kickin’ Up Dust’. It’s a wonderful country song, sincere and homespun and played straight, reminiscent of Dolly Parton as Sierra sings “Put one foot in front of the other/That’s the way it always goes/One thing leads to another/Kickin’ up dust on a hardwood floor.” The band plays it with a sort of easy, laid-back zest, almost like the way an old favourite or well-known standard would be played. It’s an uncanny sensation, as the song, while new and unheard, sounds like a rediscovered classic. It settles in all snug and nice.

A big cheer erupts as Sierra now invites Marcus Mumford and Ben Lovett onto the stage for what will be one of her best-received songs of the night – and not just because of the added star power. ‘American Dreaming’ is, I confess, not a song that’s hit me all that strongly before, but its wistful verses and anthemic chorus are ideal for a live setting. Marcus in particular seems glad to be here, bouncing out onto the stage and hugging Sierra. With Ben behind him on accordion, Marcus is relaxed and grinning behind his electric guitar, revelling in this opportunity to harmonise with Sierra as she stands with a microphone in one hand and a sprig of flowers in the other and sings. At the end, as the crowd cheers, he blows her a kiss and bows theatrically to her talent.

The goodwill spreads, with Sierra introducing her penultimate song, ‘Dollar Bill Bar’ – Marcus and Ben having now left the stage – with some simple, earnest thoughts on spirituality and loving one another. ‘Dollar Bill Bar’ is a well-judged song for this stage of the night, an easy, rolling pop number that still allows space for Sierra’s impressive vocals.

All too soon, we’re into the final song of Sierra’s set – a big finale. The big Heavy Petal Music bass drum, which has been cocked like Chehkov’s gun at the back of the stage, is now rolled up to the front and fired. Sierra begins banging on it rhythmically with a large gong mallet drumstick, her hips shaking in time as she begins howling the opening notes of ‘Fox Hunt’. Behind her, Geoff Saunders leads a willing audience in clapping their hands to the beat.

As the song builds, Sierra yells and picks up her fiddle, joining its sound to Oliver’s own fiddle. The band crashes into the music and Sierra begins to sing. ‘Fox Hunt’ has always been a barnstormer, and tonight it’s evidence of how far Sierra has come and how much potential is in her music. I had heard this footstomping crowd-pleaser back in 2022 among the few hundred people at that live gig in Liverpool, and it’s only grown in strength since then, filling this arena of 20,000 with a raucous, driving sound that morphs from fiddle hoedown to a snarling rock jam. There’s no space so large that Sierra’s sound can’t fill it perfectly.

It’s a thrilling moment, and also rather bittersweet for me, as not only do I know it marks the end of Sierra’s set – hopefully it won’t be another three years before I experience it again – but because it hints at the potential of how powerful a full headline arena set from Sierra Ferrell could be. We’ve had an abridged version tonight, a little big show from the band, but it would be fantastic to hear this blossom as a full set.

Forty-five minutes is not enough to hear such a special talent. While Sierra’s strategy of opening for Mumford and Sons, an established act, in order to grow her own audience here in the UK is an understandable one (and kudos to Mumford and Sons for giving her the platform), I do wonder if she’s not spreading herself too thin with her frequent mainstream collaborations and guest spots; if perhaps she would not be better served by visiting the UK more regularly to build her own following and thereby reaching arena-level crowds as a headliner, the way Tyler Childers and Billy Strings – who played the O2 and the Royal Albert Hall in the last couple of months, respectively – have done over the last few years. She certainly has the talent and potential for it, a natural star who has not only penned a solid stable of her own songs but who is one of those artists you love to hear interpret the material of others. I don’t know how the music business works, of course, and no doubt I speak from ignorance, but having seen Tyler and Billy graduate to the biggest arenas as headliners this year, I listen to Sierra bang the drum on ‘Fox Hunt’ tonight and know without a shadow of a doubt that she could do the same. I’d wager she’s done much to win over some new fans tonight, but those of us already under her spell know she deserves a night of her own.

‘Fox Hunt’ ends with a big finish, the petite purple lady on stage a force of nature as she stretches her arms wide with fiddle in hand and sings. As the crowd roars its applause with an enthusiasm usually reserved for a headliner, she makes sure to thank each member of her band by name.

But one name that won’t be forgotten is Sierra’s own. She will come back out again later in the night during Mumford’s set – after yet another costume change – to duet on ‘Here’ with a pink flower in her hand, but her work is already done. As she leaves the stage following her forty-five minute opening blitz and the crowd buzzes with energy, I realise I’m no longer a cuckoo in the nest, but just one more fan among a crowd of Sierra Ferrell’s thralls. She’s cast her pretty magic spell once again. Everyone else awaits the arrival of Mumford and his sons, but for me the night is already blissfully complete.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Trail of Flowers and written by Sierra Ferrell, unless noted)

I Could Drive You Crazy
Jeremiah (from Long Time Coming)
Bells of Every Chapel (Ferrell/Oliver Bates Craven) (from Long Time Coming)
Why’d Ya Do It? (from Long Time Coming)
Years (John Anderson/Dan Auerbach/David Ferguson/Patrick James McLaughlin) (from Something Borrowed, Something New: A Tribute to John Anderson)
Kickin’ Up Dust (unreleased)
American Dreaming (Ferrell/Melody Walker)
Dollar Bill Bar (Ferrell/Walker)
Fox Hunt

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

Journey Into the Childerswald: Tyler Childers Live in London

November 23, 2025 / Mike

Saturday 15th November 2025

O2 Arena, London, England

schilderwald (noun)

a “forest of signs”, a place overwhelmed by directions and signs competing for attention

Heading south on a train out of Manchester once again, I pass the now-familiar sight of the Jodrell Bank observatory, its 250-foot white dish trained at the gloomy stormswept sky. The iconic radio telescope has become a familiar sign on my increasingly frequent journeys to London; as a casual science buff it’s a welcome early treat as the rail takes me to the capital, and on my return journeys it becomes my very own Angel of the North, a sign that I will soon arrive at the comforts of home.

The train passes the great white dish slower than usual, a speed limit imposed as a consequence of delays and damage to the railway line by Storm Claudia sweeping over the country. Its ear cupped skywards, the radio telescope has long been used to observe stars and pulsars and further our understanding of the universe. It has searched for signs of extra-terrestrial life. At the dawn of the Space Age, it diligently tracked Sputnik in its flight. But soon the train trundles past, and all this passes from my mind. For today my thoughts are trained London-wards, my ears directed towards a rather different star.

Because, like it or not, Tyler Childers is a ‘star’ now. Some fans are disappointed by this; they are pushed away or leave, disenchanted, for various reasons. But other ones take their place. The fanbase grows, the faces change; even the face of Tyler, with his youthful and clean-shaven look tonight a commendable change from the grungy, bearded hellraiser of what many consider his ‘peak’ years. From the stage of the O2 Arena tonight – capacity 20,000 – he remarks that the first time he played in London, not a great many years ago, it was to eight people – “including my road manager” – in the Slaughtered Lamb pub.

To my surprise, at the end of the night I leave the gig in an odd state of mind, unsure of how I have felt about it all. It has been a warm, energetic performance, and Tyler and his band really put on a show. And yet, something about it, or at least my experience of it, has felt a tad hollow. I would fully encourage those reading this review to listen to this artist, and to see this powerful act live, but I think a review merely glazing the arena-level Tyler Childers experience would have little worth. The more interesting thing for me, in writing this review, is in exploring this unexpected feeling of hollowness after seeing one of my favourite contemporary artists.

As a disclaimer, I should say this is not a hit piece, and it’s certainly not political. Tyler Childers has come in for some criticism for political stances over the years, but I’m personally indifferent to it all. Long Violent History didn’t do anything for me, but it didn’t do anything against me either. I find his rationale on refusing to perform ‘Feathered Indians’ a bit silly, but nothing to get heated about, even if I would love to hear the song live. I didn’t like ‘In Your Love’, but that wasn’t because of any gay miner video, but because I find the song itself consciously safe and mainstream, a worrying sign of an authentic artist trending more hollow than holler. I’ve written my thoughts on artists getting political in numerous other reviews, seeing neither a need for fans to get angry about it nor a need for artists to burnish themselves with it. My thoughts on that are probably not worth the bytes they’re coded on, and besides, there’s nothing political about tonight.

Rather, I think what disconcerts me is the polish. This is very much a “show” tonight, and not exactly what you’d expect when a bunch of country boys show up with guitars and pedal steel. Everything is curated, everything is smooth and prepared. Large screen projects fantastic coloured videos tailored to each song; a visual feast, and something I’d seen done to great effect by Paul McCartney in Manchester last year. But Paul McCartney is the most famous musician in the world and has played his songs a million times over. You know you’re going to get ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Live and Let Die’. With Tyler Childers only 34 and – with respect – only one truly, truly great album in his catalogue (Purgatory), the tailored visuals betray the fact that there’ll be no spontaneity tonight. Everything is pre-planned and everyone is going to stick to the script; you know what you’re going to get. Tonight we’re watching an artist at their peak in terms of commercial success, an independent artist who has drawn a crowd of 20,000 to an arena in a foreign country. But we’re not watching an artist at their peak, creatively. A week earlier I saw the Red Clay Strays set the night on fire in Birmingham through sheer talent and upwards momentum. Tyler and his band should still be in that same thrilling moment. An artist of this level of talent should set the nearby Thames on fire. But theirs is a flame that is carefully stoked rather than set loose.

Perhaps this hollowness then is merely sadness on my part, or even ingratitude. The common objection I’ve seen to criticisms of Tyler Childers, particularly after his odd, dissonant Snipe Hunter album released earlier this year, is that an artist is free to go where they will, and “if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it”. Fair enough, and certainly I’m not one of those who crudely retort that “he was better when he was on the drugs”, even though at that time he seemed a force of chaotic genius, deeply soulful and firing off incredible songs in such number that, years later, there are still unreleased gems that fans are desperate to hear as proper studio recordings.

I live clean myself, and have never liked the ‘tortured artist’ trope. I remember the first time I really saw Van Gogh’s famous ‘Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear’ – I mean, really saw it and understood its power. A self-portrait is an artist sitting down and, stroke by stroke, analysing themselves. Van Gogh faced what he had done to himself in his self-mutilation and painted it and admitted it to himself. I realised then that Van Gogh wasn’t a great artist because he was crazy. He was a great artist in spite of being crazy. Who knows what greater wonders that poor man could have done without that horrible burden. And while of course Tyler Childers is not on that level of creative genius, the same logic applies. Everything that Tyler did “when he was on the drugs” was done in spite of them, not because of them, and getting sober is one of his most admirable achievements.

And yet, something has been lost. A spontaneity, an exuberance. The night’s far from joyless: there’s a great energy and quality of song, and Tyler himself beams with smiles and a verbose – though clearly rehearsed – humour when talking to the crowd. He sells it well, but I’m reluctant to lionise salesmen. The beard has been shaved, and the rough edges shaved off with it. The upstart Kentucky boy who wrote killer songs in his head while working odd jobs, producing more dynamite than you’d find in the local coal mines, is now actively angling for Grammys and mainstream acceptance. The breath of fresh air from the Appalachian hills has now been bottled for mass consumption. The thing that made us sit upright when we heard ‘Nose on the Grindstone’ or ‘Lady May’ or ‘Shake the Frost’ for the first time is now much harder to find. And the fans who became fans because of that special quality, well, they drift away – or, like me, arrive in the O2 in the hope of catching a remnant of it. But nothing halts that spit-in-your-eye alternative momentum than showing that you want to be accepted by the mainstream after all.

In attempting to find the right words for this peculiar feeling of unease, of disquiet, even when I have thoroughly enjoyed the night, I come across the German word schilderwald. Coined for the bewildering array of competing traffic signs and signals at busy intersections, it literally means “forest of signs”. I seize on it gratefully to explain my unknown feeling. In the O2 Arena tonight we’re in the Childerswald. There are many competing signs, many directions to go, and no one path is any clearer than another. As thousands of phones light up around the arena for people to record ‘In Your Love’ for their TikTok feeds, many raised high to show themselves singing along or crying performatively, I find myself thinking that many of these people wouldn’t be caught dead in places like The Slaughtered Lamb. Which isn’t to imply in any way that I’m a better fan; only that I’m one who has perhaps been left a few steps behind on the path Tyler has chosen to go down. These are Tyler’s people now. To use the corporate phrase his management team may well deploy as they chart his future course, they are his ‘target audience’.

For better or for worse, Tyler Childers has become an artist known as much for his left-turns and divided fanbase as for his undoubted quality as both a singer and a songwriter. This is evident in the live experience; the night at the O2 is opened by Omni of Halos, a Swedish alternative grunge-rock band whose sound is a heavy and distorted one. For people who like this kind of music, it’s the kind of music they’ll like. But even though the band have a pedal steel player, it’s an incongruous sound for a night of country music. The Swedes are followed by The Magic Numbers, a British indie rock band who are closer to the vibe we’re looking for with their melodic ‘Love’s a Game’ and the slight dissonance on ‘Sweet Divide’. They get deservedly warm applause from the crowd, but fans are still having to work to forge a path through the Childerswald to get back from where Tyler, in his latest left-turn, has sent us.

But it’s in the main set that the bewildering array of signs and lights competing in this forest become more evident tonight, even if the power of Tyler and his band do much to bring us through. Tonight is part of a tour to promote Snipe Hunter, Tyler’s latest album, which has drawn mixed reactions from his fanbase. I place myself firmly and unapologetically in the ranks of those whose reaction was ‘mixed’. I expected more from the production (particularly as the producer once made one of my favourite albums, Tom Petty’s Wildflowers). It was needlessly sloppy and dissonant, with naïve experimentation that criminally distorted the vocals of one of modern music’s most characterful singers. Even more disquieting was that half the songs on the album were instantly forgettable, which is quite alarming for such a talented songwriter. Recognise that Snipe was the latest addition to an album release run that comprises 2023’s lightweight Rustin’ in the Rain, 2022’s bloated, indulgent Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? and 2020’s irrelevant fiddle instrumental Long Violent History, and it becomes easier to understand the frustration of long-time fans.

These concerns – or admissions of disappointment – can be scoffed at by the vigilant stans who man the keyboards in Tyler’s defence, or drowned out by the off-key singing of the TikTok day-trippers and drunken cosplay cowboys who now flock to his shows, but their validity is proven somewhat by the fact that when the Snipe Hunter songs are played tonight, they’re actually pretty good.

‘Nose on the Grindstone’ is of course a fan favourite that was unsullied long before it was attached to the album, and it gets a fine reception tonight in the middle of Tyler’s mini acoustic set. Rather, it’s other songs which blossom when freed from the consequences of Snipe Hunter‘s bad decisions; the throwaway ‘Down Under’ becomes a bit more agreeable, and ‘Watch Out’ proves itself to be a good song underneath – not a beloved ‘Purgatory’ or ‘Country Squire’-level song, but maybe a ‘Creeker’.

Without the distortion of the album cut, which makes it pretty much unlistenable, the titular ‘Snipe Hunt’ emerges as a rather pleasant rocker when played straight by Tyler and his band. The opening one-two punch of ‘Eatin’ Big Time’ and ‘Dirty Ought Trill’ are good enough on the record but really show their worth live, setting us up for a rewarding night. But even so, that note of disquiet and hollowness which I keep returning to is there from this very first song. The artist who once wrote and sang compassionately – and does so again tonight – of the grandmother sitting in the corner in ‘Follow You to Virgie’ now sings of “blowing a thousand fucking dollars” on a Weiss wristwatch he’s now “flexing”.

But the hollowness I refer to is not solely attributable to Snipe Hunter. After all, ‘Bitin’ List’, another new song from the album, is already a crowd favourite and gets a roar of recognition from the London crowd as Tyler introduces it. He clearly loves it too, barking manically during the coda. If ‘Bitin’ List’ does seem a bit of a novelty song, there’s no harm at all in revelling in it while it still remains, for the moment, fresh and fun.

Instead, the hollowness resounds at some surprising moments. An early rendition of ‘I Swear (to God)’ is slightly pedestrian, a far cry from the energy with which I heard it live in London a few years ago, where it was one of the best songs on the night. ‘Jersey Giant’, which has become something of a country standard despite Tyler having not recorded a studio version of it, is capably done and yet rather bloodless, lacking the magic of his old lo-fi version that circulates among more devoted fans. Once Tyler’s found the right way he wants to do the song, I’ve no doubt he can revive its understated, wistful charm. But charming understatement is not the tone Tyler and his Weiss watch have been looking to strike in recent years; it’s not the path he’s chosen through the Childerswald. Tonight ‘Jersey Giant’ feels routine and out of place, as though Tyler feels obligated to sing it and reclaim it following its success with other artists.

The swarm of brightly-lit phones raised high to greet ‘In Your Love’, played just before ‘Jersey Giant’, are more accurate signage on this forest path. Aside from one good line (“some men search for ages…”), I’ve never been able to really like ‘In Your Love’, and Lord knows I’ve tried. It feels written to order, a sanitised ‘Feathered Indians’ replacement targeted to pull in casual, mainstream listeners with its generic lyrics and clichéd sentiment. What’s more, two of the more recent releases from Tyler are sweeping, romantic songs that hit all the marks that ‘In Your Love’ cloyingly smothers. Neither get an airing tonight: ‘Oneida’ remains on Snipe Hunter, a tidy number among a collection of red-headed stepchildren, while ‘A Song While You’re Away’ – a real gem, and proof that Tyler can still be produced well – languishes in, of all places, last year’s Twisters soundtrack.

Happily, however, the good thing about the Childerswald is that even if one route predominates and defines this current moment of Tyler’s career, there is still an array of glittering signs to transfix those of us who are disenchanted, and who would want those paths to be taken instead.

One such path is Tyler’s acoustic set in the middle – both literally and figuratively. After ‘Watch Out’ in the middle of tonight’s set, Tyler leaves the band on the stage and hustles along a pre-planned route through the crowd, towards a smaller lighted stage in the middle of the pit. Here, he straps on an acoustic guitar and sings, solo, the fan favourite ‘Lady May’. His bandmates C.J. Cain and Jesse Wells then join him, on guitar and fiddle respectively, for the afore-mentioned ‘Nose on the Grindstone’ and ‘Follow You to Virgie’.

This is the authentic, earthy Tyler we thirst for. During ‘Lady May’, which was the first song of Tyler’s I ever heard, I pull my attention away from the red-headed figure beneath the lights and back towards the main stage, now dark. The large screens remain on, projecting the image from the camera that zooms in on Tyler. He looks young, innocent and vulnerable; his eyes impossibly bright. For all the artistic left-turns he’s taken through the Childerswald, I am at least glad that the path he’s taken has been one of sobriety. By the time of the third and final song of this mini set, ‘Follow You to Virgie’, I find myself thinking that I could happily listen to a full acoustic set from Tyler, without the bells and whistles of the newly corporatised, mainstream Tyler, without the bloat and circus of a large touring band (Tyler’s added a second keys player since I last saw them live). Here, in ‘Virgie’, I can see him through the pines. Perhaps the hollowness I identify later is not from anything negative, any smoothed-over, sanitised experience or Snipe Hunter hangover, but from this pristine moment, from knowing with sadness that, at his best, Tyler Childers can be this good.

The magic remains in Tyler Childers elsewhere in the set, back on the main stage with his band around him. Early on, an energetic ‘Rustin’ in the Rain’ is described as “not a love song, but a rut song”,and its chaser, the classic ‘All Your’n’, is delivered with a beaming smile from its creator, relaxed and gesturing from the stage with a jar of water in his hand.

Later on, ‘Whitehouse Road’ proves a hit with the crowd; its return to Tyler’s setlists in recent years encouraging. The crowd had roared in vain for the song the first time I saw Tyler live in London in 2023, drawing only a curt “nope” from the man on stage, but tonight’s now the second time I’ve heard it live. It shows Tyler’s not averse to rehabilitating songs he’s previously exiled, and as he evolves he is making peace with the older, more jagged parts of himself. It doesn’t mean we’ll hear ‘Feathered Indians’, an even more beloved song, any time soon, and certainly not by the time he returns to England in just a few months. But it does suggest that those left-turns aren’t necessarily done by an artist looking to alienate his fans, even if some of them have that effect. They are turns from an artist still learning how to navigate his way through the bewildering forest of lights and signs.

As we reach the end of the night, Tyler and his band have kindled a significant flame in the crowd, with ‘Honky Tonk Flame’ and a funky ‘Way of the Triune God’ setting us up well for a big finish. ‘Universal Sound’ is not only one of Tyler’s best songs but also one of the best songs of the night. The vast colourful screens have been something of an ill-fitting distraction for what is still, at its best, country music, but they now prove their worth, projecting animated images of the cosmos to complement Tyler’s metaphysical lyrics. A glitter ball gently scatters shards of warm light across the rest of the darkened arena like stars across the void. The big arena screens then catch light for ‘House Fire’, turning the room an intense red and orange for tonight’s final number. It’s a crowd-pleasing foot-stomper that sugars the pill of knowing there will be no encore.

Encores are a strange thing; at their best, they are spontaneous eruptions of joy from a crowd wanting to show an artist how much they are loved by demanding more. But many artists clearly plan for an encore and see it as part of a normal set, with everyone buying in to the odd pantomime of an artist leaving stage and then coming back again. Some, I’ve noticed, even leave for the encore hit songs that it would have been inconceivable for them not to play.

Encores, then, are far from spontaneous, though we never mind the pantomime of this. In contrast, when Tyler notified us earlier in the night that they will not be doing an encore, and sticks to this at the end of the night, it does show the lack of spontaneity more starkly than any pre-planned encore. The night will never be allowed to become special enough to make an encore a necessity. I realise afterwards that Tyler’s never done an encore when I’ve seen him live, although I admit that is a small sample size.

The Tyler Childers show, then, is tightly defined, smoothed-down; a night of a well-drilled band following their drill, the animated videos on the screens reflecting the songs at every step. It’s large, it’s colourful, it’s a damn fine show; but I do find myself thirsting more for a band and an artist who rock up with momentum, and plug into their amps looking to generate a natural wave among the crowd rather than bringing a fully pre-configured wave machine. It’s such things that make a night visceral, and the moments that I remember most fondly from the live gigs I’ve attended over the years, the ones that I wish I could bottle up and experience the sensation of once again, have always been the ones that just happened, the ones on the edge, the ones that felt like they happened only on that night and never would again and you really did just have to be there.

Tonight, in contrast, has been more on the rails; a rollercoaster, to be sure, but a rollercoaster is something with manufactured thrills, and people remember their best nights of live music far longer than they do their ride on a rollercoaster. We are fans and the Childerswald is an exhilarating place to roam, but the course has been carefully plotted, those flashing lights not competing now but pre-determined signals on an optimised route.

The following morning my experience remains on the rails, with the delayed train wending me home. Better on the rails than completely off the rails, I find myself thinking, looking back on the night. Tyler is sober and clean and making music, and I am perhaps too harsh in choosing to be fascinated by that small kernel of hollowness rather than by all the good Tyler and his band have given London. His left-turns can be odd, showing that drugs are not the only way an ex-junkie can self-harm. His live experience is now just a tad too slick, but there are yet heights he is capable of scaling. He is the conductor of his train; he can guide it where he wants, and perhaps if it had gone differently for him and badly he wouldn’t even be here anymore to do any of it. If this odd, slightly indulged iteration is the only Tyler Childers we get, then I remain thankful to have it. The better parts of what he’s done in the past remain salvageable, and they are at hand to pick up again and bring along if Tyler wishes it.

The train passes Jodrell Bank; an exit sign from the colour and lights of the Childerswald. I will soon arrive at the comforts of home, where I will be restored and no doubt find myself willing to return to this forest again.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Snipe Hunter and written by Tyler Childers, unless noted)

Eatin’ Big Time
Dirty Ought Trill
I Swear (to God) (from Purgatory)
Trudy (Charlie Daniels) (unreleased)
Rustin’ in the Rain (from Rustin’ in the Rain)
All Your’n (from Country Squire)
In Your Love (Childers/Geno Seale) (from Rustin’ in the Rain)
Jersey Giant (unreleased)
Bitin’ List
Watch Out
Lady May (from Purgatory)
Nose on the Grindstone
Follow You to Virgie (from Live on Red Barn Radio)
Old Country Church (J. W. Vaughn) (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
Whitehouse Road (from Purgatory)
Down Under
Honky Tonk Flame (from Purgatory)
Way of the Triune God (from Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?)
Snipe Hunt
Universal Sound (from Purgatory)
House Fire (from Country Squire)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

Our Cup Runneth Over: The Red Clay Strays Live in Birmingham

November 12, 2025 / Mike

Thursday 6th November 2025

O2 Academy, Birmingham, England

If rock and roll is anything, it’s in evidence tonight. The Red Clay Strays take to the stage and tear straight into ‘Ramblin”, clearly determined to give the three thousand fans who have sold out the O2 Academy in Birmingham their money’s worth. It’s the start of what proves to be an impeccably delivered set on a truly special night for everyone who’s lucky enough to be here.

It’s a special night for Robbie Prevete, the band’s bespectacled, curly-haired guitar tech who joins the Strays on stage for three songs of their encore. Frontman Brandon Coleman, an amused smile on his lips, is at pains to point out that “there’s nothing wrong with Robbie. He’s a completely normal person.” His presence on the stage, strumming Brandon’s guitar, is not part of any “Make-a-Wish” pledge, but because “he’s actually the most talented guitarist standing on stage right now.” Drew Nix and Zach Rishel, who have both played incredibly tonight, do not object. Goodwill flows from this band like a cup runneth over.

It’s a special night for the Strays’ fellow Alabaman Early James, who opens with a set that would be worth the entry fee alone – and perhaps even worth the two-and-a-half-hour journey I have made down from Manchester tonight, and will make back again in the early hours. Slapping his guitar like an old bluesman and singing with an enthralling Tom Waits-esque rasp, he provides a darkly glittering litany of songs including ‘Tumbleweed’, ‘Taste of Sin’, ‘Mama Can Be My Valentine’ and ‘I Could Just Die Right Now’. The song which put him on my radar – the ‘Real Low Down Lonesome’ duet with Sierra Ferrell – isn’t present in his setlist tonight, but he does invite his girlfriend Cammie Windley on stage to sing, June Carter-esque, on the John Prine duet ‘In Spite of Ourselves’. He even gets the Strays’ drummer John Hall to come out early to provide a beat for the best damn twisted cover of Hank Williams’ ‘Hey Good Lookin” I’ve ever heard.

It’s a special night for the Strays themselves, playing for the first time in Birmingham, England and a long way from their days as a bar band in Mobile, Alabama. At that time – remarkably, just a few years ago – even the state’s city of Birmingham (“we pronounce it Birming-HAM”, Early James says) must have seemed a distant goal, let alone playing Birmingham (pronounced Birmin-GUM) as part of a sellout tour on the other side of the Atlantic, with a rowdy English crowd signing your own songs back to you.

But most of all, it’s a special night for 24-year-old Ellen Ratcliffe. Two-thirds of the way through their set, the Red Clay Strays begin playing those distinctive chords of ‘Wondering Why’ and Brandon Coleman sings the viral opening lyrics. Thousands of phones light up as hands train them on the stage, but one man has other plans. Amongst the throng of the crowd, he gets down on one knee and asks Ellen to marry him.

The man has timing that John Hall would be proud of. Brandon smiles and points towards them. “Looks like she said yes,” he announces mid-verse, with genuine warmth in his voice. The crowd erupt into cheers that rival any tonight. After the song ends he passes his congratulations to the newly-engaged couple, along with some advice. “I tell ya, don’t listen to anybody that says ‘Do not get married’. Because getting married and being married is one of the coolest things ever. I heard somebody say one time: ‘I’ve never seen two selfless people get a divorce.’ So as long as you’re watching out for each other, put one another above yourselves, you’ll be together forever.”

This is the power of the Red Clay Strays. For a band that are heirs-apparent to the Rolling Stones, they are unashamedly Christian, moral and straightlaced. They are wise beyond their years and, as both their song lyrics and Brandon’s mike will show tonight, are willing to tackle subjects such as depression and mental health without ever once appearing insincere, cloying or virtue-signalling. They can do all this and yet remain effortlessly cool, whether that is the lean, suited retro Fifties look Brandon cultivates or the more laid-back raglan shirt and cowboy hat look of guitarist Drew Nix.

And, beneath it all, there is of course the music. This is not “Christian rock”, but pure, fresh-cut rock and roll that just happens to be made by a group of young Christians not abashed to express their moral beliefs in a culture that has long since commodified rebellion, degeneracy and apathy and called it ‘cool’. Theirs is a generation that drinks less, indulges less; exercises more, talks more. Rock and roll wasn’t dead, but it had been hollowed out by excess and insincerity. The Red Clay Strays have seized the mantle of becoming this generation’s great rock and roll hope and given it new life and purpose, while still remaining plugged directly into the raw and raucous power that the music pulsed with in its prime.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with the song that immediately follows ‘Wondering Why’ and the proposal in the crowd. Brandon introduces it as an old song from when the band “first started leaving home and being on the road”. ‘Till Things Get Right’ remains unreleased, but it’s a truly fantastic song. No wonder this current tour is named the ‘Get Right’ tour, for the song takes pride of place. It would be the sweetest release of music even without the marriage proposal we’ve just witnessed, but hearing it tonight, knowing something so wonderful and memorable has just happened to two people in the crowd and feeling genuinely happy for them, makes the song’s message even more true, as though the lyrics have been laced with gold.

We only have to hang in till things get right, as they surely will, as they have for two young people tonight. The song starts with a simple, timeless riff, before Brandon’s soulful singing begins and the crowd sings along at the perfect moment (“and money’s always tight – tight-tight-tight-tight!”). It’s everything that rock and roll should be: a sense of hope, of boundless freedom, of recognising that good things can happen and the world is better for rock and roll being played. You don’t have to believe in divine righteousness to believe in righteousness, and wherever you stand in life this song just hits right. For all but two of us in the room it’s merely a blissful moment of pure rock and roll straight out of a Seventies road trip, but for the newly-engaged couple it’s the perfect song to begin their new journey on.

If ‘Wondering Why’ and ‘Till Things Get Right’ soundtrack the finest moment of the night, they are not alone in thrilling the crowd. The whole night has been finely sculpted by the band, a night of moments that together become a powerful, exhilarating experience of the sort that only a generational rock and roll band can provide. The Red Clay Strays might have caught a break when the Western AF version of ‘Wondering Why’ went viral, but behind that viral punch there was a great weight of follow-through.

This is proven as early as the band’s second song tonight. ‘Moment of Truth’ isn’t one of the Strays’ best-known songs, but it’s an early introduction to their on-stage force. “Why do I do all these things that I do?” Brandon sings, teasing out every iamb and stressing it with soul. It’s one of those songs that’s slept on, but you can easily see it becoming a deep-cut that people rediscover in years to come.

The band follow it with ‘Stone’s Throw’, another from that fateful Western AF session that draws an early frisson of recognition among the crowd as Andrew Bishop’s bass guitar begins the song’s riff. The bassist is clearly having fun; during the following number, ‘Disaster’, he takes a swig from Drew Nix’s drink after the guitarist stalks across the stage to trade licks with Zach Rishel. He grins impishly as the returning Nix gives him a playful kick.

The band then show their range with the mature, intelligent ‘Forgive’ and the chunky blues-rocker ‘Good Godly Woman’ on either side of the catchy, soulful ‘Do Me Wrong’, which garners a swaying singalong from the Birmingham crowd. The Strays follow with ‘People Hatin”, their recent message song about “calling out hatred, no matter what side you’re on”. I confess I struggled to like this song on first listen, considering it a bit too on-the-nose and disliking message songs in general, but ‘People Hatin” is delivered well tonight – a song I suspect will always find an extra dimension when played live.

From here, our cup truly does runneth over, as a band that have been impeccable so far tonight begin to show us just how good they can be. They are soulful and thoughtful in the timeless ‘Moments’, raw and cathartic on ‘Drowning’. ‘Devil in My Ear’ sounds dark and foreboding, ‘Ghosts’ funky and danceable. In between, Brandon takes a seat at the keys next to Sevans Henderson and sings the uplifting ‘Sunshine’, a “song about being hopeless but trusting in Jesus anyway”. No sunrise ever sounded so hard-won.

It’s after ‘Ghosts’ that Brandon returns to guitar and we’re treated to that special experience of ‘Wondering Why’ and ‘Till Things Get Right’. If that wasn’t enough, they chase it with ‘I’m Still Fine’, one of their most exquisite, world-weary slices of Southern soul, and end the set with the wild church-fire of ‘On My Knees’, Brandon dancing frantically in place to bring the crowd to fever pitch.

“We’re fully aware that not everybody believes in God,” Brandon says after ‘I’m Still Fine’, “and everyone has their own opinions on God. That doesn’t matter to us: if you like our music, we’re happy to have ya. We’re not trying to be anybody’s preachers or shove it down anybody’s throat or be anybody’s spiritual leaders. We are not perfect people, I promise you.”

He looks to John Hall. “John, he drinks a lot of beer,” Brandon says with mock sincerity, drawing laughs. The drummer had been central to my last review of the Red Clay Strays live, when they came to Manchester a year ago. Tonight he’s been largely obscured from my view, though he’s certainly made himself heard.

“None of us have any business being behind a pulpit. We just make music about our life and God’s a big part of our life, so He’s in our music. It’s as simple as that.

“And we make music that we’re proud of, something we’ll be proud to be behind when we’re gone. Because music is medicine and helps people. And I think one thing I’d want somebody to take away from us is: Have some hope. It’s not over. You’re still alive and you’re still breathing and it’s gonna be OK. Just have some hope.”

These are men who were drowning, who were going nowhere, who now stand on a stage together in front of a cheering crowd as the next great rock and roll band. And they did it by staying true to themselves and their convictions.

“All you have to do is persevere, and then one day you’ll be looking back on whatever it is you thought was going to kill you and take you out. You’ll be that much stronger of a person and your faith will be that much stronger. And you’ll be rejoicing and be thankful.”

Regardless of where you stand on the particulars of the Christian faith, it’s hard not to rejoice tonight. To see people doing the right thing in the right way, sticking to their creed while still pushing themselves out into new terrain, is a wonderful thing to witness. It’s not only that the Red Clay Strays play fantastic rock and roll, and have seized this opportunity to bring their art into the world. It’s that alongside art, we sometimes sense that there is also an art to life; a way of living that is the best way of treating others, of experiencing moments, and of making this vale of tears our home.

The Strays would no doubt call this living right under God, but it doesn’t have to be seen that way if that’s too unpalatable for some. The Strays might not be anybody’s preacher, but a good night of music is anybody’s preacher; it is powerful, communal and deeper than rationality or sense. There is an art to life and not only the Strays but anyone who goes out to experience nights like this is practicing it. We’re all made by these moments.

And that art of living can only be practiced with appropriate care when we realise that it’s finite. In its most serious terms, it’s finite in that the people hatin’ the Strays have spoken against leads to death and violence, as it did with the Charlie Kirk assassination which prompted the song’s premature release (I wrote more about Kirk here.)

But in happier terms, it’s finite in the sense that you never know again when you’ll experience such a moment as the one you’re in right now. The Red Clay Strays are destined for larger stages – indeed, the day after this Birmingham gig they announce they’ll be headlining Madison Square Garden next year. And who knows when they’ll return to the UK, and when they do, if I’ll be able to stand as close to the stage as I do tonight at the O2 Academy. Maybe one day the grown-up children of Ellen Ratcliffe and her fiancé will groan at the competition for tickets at a Red Clay Strays stadium concert the same way we baulk at those of the Rolling Stones. But because their parents had been practicing the art of life they will be able to smile and say that they saw the band when they were on the way up, in front of just a few thousand people.

But even though we realise it’s all finite, that doesn’t mean it has to end just yet. After long shouts for an encore – long enough, in fact, that I almost begin to doubt the band are coming back out – the Strays return to the stage. With Robbie Prevete playing his guitar, Brandon delivers a powerful, devotional rendition of ‘Will the Lord Remember Me?’, before taking his acoustic guitar for the restful ‘God Does’.

Zach Rishel bends the notes that introduce ‘Wanna Be Loved’, prompting cheers of recognition from the crowd. The band are having fun, Brandon walking to the lip of the stage as Robbie plays his guitar. He then rushes towards Andrew Bishop to chase him away from his spot, the bassist grinning boyishly. Brandon then sits on the edge of the stage, singing to the crowd. The band are in their element, riding a wave of their own creation.

The ease in which they ride this wave, a wave of genuine power, is evident in the final song of the encore, the glorious, triumphant rocker ‘No One Else Like Me’. For all that you can draw analogues for the band – their sound pulls the best from Sixties and Seventies rock, along with classic soul and country – the Strays are their own force, heirs to the throne rather than retro pretenders. Brandon says he wrote the song as a “funny little response to everybody that likes to compare me to Elvis. And Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and anybody else like that” and while you can draw such comparisons from both his look and his sound tonight – that soulful voice as true a successor to Ray Charles and Otis Redding as you could wish – he is very much his own man as he takes a bow and leaves the stage.

The band continue to play, bringing ‘No One Else Like Me’ to its frenetic conclusion. Robbie and Zach play together. Drew walks to the lip of the stage, his eyes focused on his frets. Behind him, Andrew jumps off the stage and walks along the front row, still playing. He stands up on the rail in front of me before jumping back up on stage and heading to John’s thrashing drums. As the song ends, John throws his sticks up into the air. Zach throws his pick into the crowd.

The Red Clay Strays may be fired by a holier Spirit, but there’s no doubting what has made the night so special for the few thousand in the Academy hall in Birmingham tonight. This is the spirit of rock and roll brought to full flame.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Made By These Moments, unless noted)

Ramblin’ (The Red Clay Strays/Dave Cobb)
Moment of Truth (Matthew Coleman) (from Moment of Truth)
Stone’s Throw (Drew Nix/Eric Erdman) (from Moment of Truth)
Disaster (M. Coleman)
Forgive (M. Coleman) (from Moment of Truth)
Do Me Wrong (Nix) (from Moment of Truth)
Good Godly Woman (Brandon Coleman/Nix/Brandon Rickman) (single)
People Hatin’ (B. Coleman/M. Coleman/Cobb/Andrew Bishop/Zach Rishel/John Hall) (single)
Moments (B. Coleman/M. Coleman/Nix/Anderson East)
Drowning (Nix)
Devil in My Ear (Nix)
Sunshine (M. Coleman) (from Moment of Truth)
Ghosts (Nix) (from Moment of Truth)
Wondering Why (B. Coleman/Nix/Dan Couch) (from Moment of Truth)
Till Things Get Right (M. Coleman) (unreleased)
I’m Still Fine (M. Coleman)
On My Knees (The Red Clay Strays/Cobb)
Encore: Will the Lord Remember Me? (E. M. Bartlett) (single)
Encore: God Does (Nix)
Encore: Wanna Be Loved (M. Coleman/Dakota Coleman)
Encore: No One Else Like Me (B. Coleman/M. Coleman)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

In the Court of the King of Instruments: Roger Sayer Performs Interstellar Live at Blackburn Cathedral

November 2, 2025 / Mike

Friday 24th October 2025

Blackburn Cathedral, Blackburn, England

Déjà vu is usually a feeling that strikes you unawares, and often in inexplicable moments. The uncanny sense that you’ve been here before, that your brain has just delivered to you vividly but without the corresponding file pulled from the vaults of memory to provide context. Sometimes it can be unsettling; other times it can be comforting. It is not known for sure why it happens, but we consider it a harmless glitch or misfire in the brain as it goes about its many plastic tasks.

As I park my car and walk towards Blackburn Cathedral in the dark, the trees along the path not yet shed for the autumn, I don’t know if there is a supplementary word to attach to déjà vu to describe what I feel now. Perhaps this feeling is what the brain is reaching for when it misfires for that uncanny sensation: a legitimate recognition, a knowingness, a familiarity as I enter and scan my ticket and a graceful usher guides me to my seat.

There is no need to do so. I know the way, though I do not tell her this. Because this is the very same concert I attended almost exactly a year ago, with an identically serene night-lit approach to the very same welcoming church, and the same almost imperceptible drizzling of rain pattering against the Anglican stone. As the usher smiles pleasantly and takes her leave, I imagine I could almost be a ghost or a mind caught within a dream, performing a perpetually renewed cycle and welcomed now back to the fold.

It is as though the never-ending note that Roger Sayer referred to when I saw him perform here last year has indeed continued to play, carrying on into an annual return. The Q&A session which marks the halfway point of tonight’s concert is shorter and less in-depth than it was for the 10th anniversary of Interstellar last year, but Roger, the organist who played on Hans Zimmer’s original score, still communicates to the crowd some of the interesting features of that music. Not least that it begins and ends on that same, never-ending note – a mark of travelling and space-faring, of thematic harmony, of eternity in an empty space.

It is this remarkable depth to the music of Interstellar which ensures its continued popularity, beyond the exquisite ingenuity of its motifs. As thrilling as it is to hear some of those well-known themes from the film from the pipes of the cathedral’s organ tonight, it is not solely for this reason that Blackburn Cathedral drew a sell-out crowd tonight. We are drawn here because, like that mysterious feeling of déjà vu, the unknowable plasticity of our brain recognises something in the music to be heard tonight. While on a conscious level we can appreciate the majesty, the harmony and the epic quality of this grand music, our subconscious brain pulls towards some deeper correlation. This recognition manifests itself as reverence, the harmony between the unknown that Christianity seeks to explain and the awesome unknown of space into which Interstellar quested. It just seems right that if you hear this music you hear it from the organ of an impressive stone church, a metallic crown of thorns hanging above the altar.

It must be this deep, almost metaphysical reverence which drew me here again tonight, because I knew in advance it would be the same music I heard last year. Indeed, my review here could do no better than repeat last year’s narration of the experience of the music (for brevity’s sake, I’ll suffice with a link instead); a repeat performance of Roger Sayer’s carefully curated suite of Interstellar music, which condenses the expansive, three-hour Hans Zimmer score down to forty minutes while still hitting all the major themes.

There are some differences between the two nights I have heard this live from Blackburn Cathedral. Some are small: the seat the usher leads me to is a premium seat near the front – I learned my lesson and booked early this time. From this vantage point the music proves more resounding, the Q&A responses clearer. Another change is that this iteration of the music of Interstellar is “under Gaia”; a vast model of the Earth hangs in the nave, replacing last year’s installation of the Moon. (During the Q&A, someone asks Roger which he prefers, and he diplomatically chooses the current installation. I preferred the Moon.)

Other changes from last year are more notable. Last year the suite of music prior to Interstellar comprised of the Strauss music best known for its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’, which contains motifs that later inspired John Williams for Star Wars. This time round, Roger Sayer calls a spade a spade and plays the music from science-fiction films directly. John Williams’ various Star Wars themes are prominent, and are joined by the uplifting childlike wonder of his ‘Flying Theme’ from E.T., while the night begins with the Thunderbirds theme by Barry Gray, who was born here in Blackburn and once studied at this cathedral.

The most notable piece in this opening suite is a theme composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, used centuries later as the soundtrack for the science-fiction film Solaris. This is the only piece in the opening suite which was written specifically for the organ. The rest, Roger tells us, are transcriptions; the figuration usually done by violins and now moved by him onto the various stops and keys of the organ. The difference is marked; while all the themes are performed well, the Solaris theme is a clear standout. Like Interstellar later in the night – also composed specifically for the organ – it is quite at home.

Of the music of Interstellar as it is performed tonight, I actually have little to say. Even if I hadn’t already contributed some remarks on the music in my review last year, it would be hard for me to write any further this time. One of the main reasons I write reviews of the concerts I attend is to remember the blow-by-blow of the night: how close the room felt, which songs garnered the loudest cheer, whether it rained outside. But a blow-by-blow account is impossible when the main piece is a single forty-minute movement – Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar. A return visit, one year after the first, is therefore an unprecedented opportunity for my brain to sink the groove of memory it founded last year a little deeper. And this is not a wasted event: who wouldn’t want to relive some of the best concert experiences they have had?

When we recall special days we find our brains have filed them away mostly in moments and feelings rather than in their entirety. When I think back to the astonishing Nick Cave gig I attended last year, for example, it’s not the whole night which comes to mind, nor any one particular song, but the broad swell of raw, unadulterated bliss that he and the Bad Seeds evoked. Memories of other nights are anchored in certain moments: Kassi Valazza picking the guitar notes of ‘From Newman Street’ as the bells of the Old Church at St. Pancras gently tolled outside, or 40,000 hands waving from side to side as Bruce Springsteen sang ‘Bobby Jean’ in Manchester.

My memory of the music of Interstellar at Blackburn Cathedral this time round is cemented by meeting Roger Sayer after the concert; shaking his hand, buying a copy of his music. I spoke to him briefly of my recent visit to Temple Church, where he is based. On a business trip to London, I had been able to duck out of my office on my lunch break and walk a short distance into the calm and gentle temple courtyard. Considering it’s only a stone’s throw away from the hustle and bustle of Fleet Street, the church built by the Knights Templar is remarkably silent and serene.

Another recent memory, still vivid in its every blow, is of hearing Billy Strings at the Royal Albert Hall in London just a couple of weeks ago, a place where Roger Sayer has also performed the music he plays tonight. When I was there, I had looked around at the vast dome and recalled the famous Beatles lyric about “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire… Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” In rather cosmic symmetry, I now find myself two weeks later in Blackburn, Lancashire, listening to the sound of Interstellar erupt from four thousand holes atop the four thousand pipes of the cathedral’s Walker organ.

It is a magnificent sound, and a humbling one. The pipes are threaded into the walls, the church itself the instrument’s resonance chamber; tonight is the awesome noise of a building itself being played. Not for nothing does Roger relate during the Q&A that the organ is considered the “king of instruments”, a phrase often attributed to Mozart (who knew a thing or two about good music). While Roger deservedly takes the applause after each movement of music and greets members of the audience afterwards, he is aware that he’s not the star of the show. The vast organ itself is the star, as it rises in sound and mass and bursts with aural supernova, delivering the tailor-made music that we’ve gathered in reverence to hear.

And it’s with striking humility that Roger Sayer answers a question during tonight’s Q&A – an answer worthy of recording for posterity and therefore validating my attempt at a review. Having just performed the suite of music including Star Wars, E.T. and Solaris, Roger is asked by a member of the audience whether he does “not get sick of film music?”

The question is asked politely and honestly; Roger’s response is measured, emphasising his love for movie soundtracks, not just Interstellar. He mentions how the film received some criticism for how the music would sometimes overpower the dialogue, and reveals that this was a deliberate artistic decision on the part of Zimmer and Christopher Nolan, the film’s director. The music is there to help tell the story just as much as the dialogue is, he says, and in certain moments “music carries on when the words fail,” the swell of organ music telling the story better than any incidental line filling a gap in the screenplay ever could. Roger concludes by rhapsodising the “wonderful synergy” between music and film epitomised by the triumph of Interstellar. “Together,” he says, “they’re the most powerful thing we’ve got.”

In the cold light of day, we can still recognise the truth of that response. Think of a film without its music and you think of a bird without its wings. But in the court of the king of instruments, on the interregnum between the music, the great organ rests silently as it is said. Its own answer will come in the second set, as Roger takes his seat at the keys with his back to the audience and the king fills its vast lungs with an intake of breath and begins its reign anew.

Setlist:

The Thunderbirds March (from Thunderbirds) (Barry Gray)
Flying Theme (from E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial) (John Williams)
The Imperial March (from Star Wars) (Williams)
Princess Leia’s Theme (from Star Wars) (Williams)
March from Things to Come (from Things to Come) (Arthur Bliss)
Choral Prelude (from Solaris) (Johann Sebastian Bach)
The Throne Room and End Titles (from Star Wars) (Williams)
Q&A and Intermission
Interstellar (Hans Zimmer)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My science-fiction writing can be found here.

Watch With Us the Minutes of This Night: Toria Wooff Live in Chester

October 26, 2025 / Mike

Sunday 19th October 2025

St. Mary’s Creative Space, Chester, England

“Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,

And will not let belief take hold of him

Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us.

Therefore I have entreated him along

With us to watch the minutes of this night,

That if again this apparition come,

He may approve our eyes and speak to it.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, ACT 1, SCENE 1, 23-29

So says the sentinel Marcellus in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as he brings Horatio to the battlements of Elsinore to verify the sighting of the Ghost in armour which is shortly to appear. His fellow guard Barnardo supports him in the face of Horatio’s scepticism, imploring the lord to “sit down awhile, And let us once again assail your ears” with what they have these last two nights seen.

An odd way to begin a review of a live gig in 2025, to be sure, but as I exit my dew-drenched car on an appropriately ghostly and silent night and walk across the courtyard to the top of St. Mary’s Hill, just within the city walls of Chester, I know that I am at risk of merely repeating myself if I were to relate only a stolid narrative of this night of music. It is the fourth time I’ve seen Toria Wooff live in just five months and, having written reviews of those previous concerts in Manchester, Liverpool and Bury, I know exactly what to expect from where I see the church tower manifest in the autumn dark. As I pass under the welcoming porchlight of the church of St. Mary, I know I’ll be once again hearing the remarkable music of Toria Wooff and Polly Virr. What I write, therefore, is less a review than an imploration for others to follow me in doing the same.

In many ways, Toria Wooff under the arches of the church tonight provides the quintessential experience of her music; a distillation of everything that I have found appealing in her sound since first hearing her album in May and then hearing it again live from a basement in Manchester just a couple of weeks later. I knew then what has been confirmed in the live experiences since; that this was a singer-songwriter of real talent, able to back up a singing voice that is alternately haunting, tender and powerful with songwriting of real originality, dexterity and craft.

And tonight the setlist (which Toria autographs for me at the end – a genuine friendliness when meeting fans being another hallmark of her live shows) is the strongest I’ve seen. She plays all but one of the songs from her self-titled debut album, which is an excellent record, but also provides six unreleased songs which – I would imagine – will be there on the second album. When that album comes – Toria says tonight it is currently in the tracking stage – it will be, if tonight’s performances are any confirmation, as successful an artistic expression as the first.

Indeed, the first song Toria plays tonight when she takes the stage is one of those unreleased numbers. ‘The Bargain’ is a subtle song that cleverly recasts the plight of a woman who risks being controlled by a charming man into something akin to a deal made with the Devil – who, of course, always approaches with fair words and appearance that hides his true self.

The church is the finest setting in which to hear the song. While St. Mary’s on the Hill hasn’t been used for worship in more than fifty years, it still retains deep in its stones that grandeur and quiet communal awe that all old churches possess. After I enter, I take a look around the nave before finding an empty seat in the front row. We’re surrounded by black curtains along the arcades and in front of the apse, but I can sit back and look up to see striking carved bosses in the camber beam roof. The building itself is older than the words of the Bard that I quoted at the start of this review, and the three witches supposedly buried in the grounds would perhaps be pleased to find a kinswoman standing confidently in the chancel tonight. Toria Wooff is a self-professed Goth, and tonight she’s dressed in a long black dress, with black boots and black hair and blood-red lips, a Taylor acoustic guitar resting across her body. Polly Virr, who takes a seat beside her and rests her cello against her neck, is also dressed all in black.

In fact, the only performer who doesn’t bedeck themselves in black tonight is opening act Sam Moss, who steps out in troubadour colours of olive and weathered grey. He delivers a fine acoustic set in a soft, soulful voice, the Boston-based musician’s songs sounding like Walden set to chords. After delivering seven songs he departs for another gig he has across town.

He’s succeeded by David Gorman, Toria’s regular opener on this autumn tour, who is dressed all in black in gothic solidarity with his headliner. He provides a slightly longer and even more successful set, including his latest single ‘Darlin’ and two new songs, ‘Hourglass’ and ‘Morning’. (“Although I appreciate all my songs are new to you,” he says to the audience.) Alongside an incongruous but successful cover of Blink-182’s ‘All the Small Things’, there are the apposite songs ‘Curses’, ‘La Mort’ and ‘Another Midnight’ – all of which ensure I’ll be looking into this musician further. That is, if we all make it: both Sam and David sing lyrics tonight that make reference to apocalypse or the end of the world, and I find myself thinking that perhaps they know something we don’t, and that I should take the opportunity to make things right with the Lord before I leave this church.

But if there’s rapture tonight, it’s Toria who’s causing it. After ‘The Bargain’ I already know I made the right decision in coming here. I had been at a crossroads of my own, knowing that in driving to Chester to make the gig I would be missing most of Manchester United’s visit to Anfield – the Red Devils being one form of devil worship that’s socially acceptable. In the event it’s a historic 2-1 win (not that you care, of course), but even though I miss it I don’t regret my decision. It’s Toria’s set which provides the best 90 minutes tonight.

Having played the first song solo, Toria is now joined by Polly Virr for the remainder of the night. Polly is Toria’s not-so-secret weapon; a cello is one of the most exquisite sounds you could ever hope to hear and Polly plays it expertly. She adds a gorgeous texture to Toria’s already-compelling songs, complementing her soaring voice well. She applies deft touches and moments of sweeping power, whether that’s a pensive delicacy on ‘Sweet William’, deep-toned plucking on ‘The Flood’, the drive behind ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, or the cathartic release of ‘See Things Through’ in tonight’s encore.

On the second song of the set, ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, Polly substitutes the fine steel guitar of the album version with her cello. The song’s one of Toria’s best and most accessible, a showcase for her vocals and her songwriting. Its steel-laden album cut is a good entry point for fans of alternative country and Americana into her music.

But it’s with the third song, ‘Song for A’, that the night in Chester begins to distinguish itself from my previous experiences of Toria Wooff live. Maybe it’s just an effect of the travelling – Toria’s more than halfway through a nine-day nationwide tour, and played two hundred miles away in London the night before – but I detect an air of melancholy in some of the songs tonight, stronger than I’ve felt them before. ‘Song for A’, a tribute to a lost but not forgotten friend, has this quality anyway, but when I hear ‘Good Mother’ later in the night it’s the first time I’ve really been hit by the full scope of the sadness in the song. “I could have been a good mother, if that’s the card I was dealt,” Toria sings.

The melancholy doesn’t affect her playing or her voice – the latter is the purest I’ve yet heard it – and nor does it dampen the warm humour always present in her set. Toria mentions how she recently introduced Polly by saying she played the violin. As Polly looks up smiling from behind what is definitely not a violin, Toria says her cello is either “a massive violin, or she’s really small.” She also later delivers a disarming anecdote about embarrassing herself by miming a walk down a staircase at a previous gig, after David Gorman had gestured to her at the merchandise table during his opening set. “I doubled down and did it again,” she groans. “So now I mention my own merch. It shocked me into compliance.”

‘Good Mother’ is one of six unreleased songs Toria plays for us tonight, including the afore-mentioned ‘The Bargain’ and ‘Black Shuck’, a short “interlude” about a “cool as fuck” medieval story of a red-eyed demon dog which broke into a church. Toria is on home turf tonight; while she was born in Horwich, near Bolton (“if I want to be romantic, I say I’m from just off the West Pennine Moors,” she tells the amused audience), she has made Chester her home. And where better to bring new material to an audience than the same city where you are currently recording it?

With that in mind, Toria plays a new song she says she’s never played before. Marked on the setlist as ‘Noiselessly’ (Toria doesn’t introduce it by name tonight), it’s the latest evidence that this Northern songstress is quietly building a strong body of work that deserves to begin causing a stir. “Light up your mind,” she sings, the music rising as it finds a new chord.

It’s immediately followed by another unreleased original, ‘Aleister’. Even before I saw the name spelt on the setlist after the show, I suspected this song was inspired by the occultist Aleister Crowley, for not only is Toria a proud Goth girl but an avid Led Zeppelin fan. It’s a thrilling folk song, one of those confident melodies where the lyrics land emphatically on the chords like boots on stairs. Toria’s eyes scan the crowd as she confidently sings ‘Aleister’ from the chancel of St. Mary’s Church. It would be far too fanciful to suggest her eyes alight on me in the front row when she sings of “bored housewives summoning Archangel Michael”, but it’s a cool moment regardless.

But by far the most notable unreleased song Toria plays tonight is one she says has “been part of my set for a little while” already. And I can attest to that, having heard it on each of the three previous occasions I’ve heard her live. Despite its familiarity to me now, I still get goosebumps when I hear her high, haunting voice on ‘House on the Hill’, a song she says is inspired by the imagery in Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black: “the descriptions of the marshland and the desolate house… it’s frightening, but beautifully worded.” The song sung by the Woman in Black on stage tonight gets better every time I hear it, as though ‘House on the Hill’ finds more invigorating breath to draw upon here in St. Mary’s on the Hill.

It says a lot for the musical wealth on display that I feel I can relate much of the power and magic of the concert tonight without really mentioning two of Toria’s most popular songs, ‘See Things Through’ and ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’, both of which she plays. But, as I wrote earlier, this is less a review than an imploration, and there is little I can do other than to encourage you to go listen to them yourself, whether on the impressive album recording or live at one of Toria’s gigs.

Because if you are in England, and particularly if you are in the North, there will be plenty of opportunities to see her live. Toria tours frequently and, as mentioned, she is already well on her way with recording a second album – a half-dozen dark jewels of which we’ve been privileged to hear tonight. If it’s a sad fact that talent is so scarcely rewarded in our society – and Toria has plenty of talent – it is at least true that hard work and industry sometimes is.

Bells tolled as I approached the church tonight; they will toll again through the fog as I leave. In between there is remarkable music, and I can only hope that one day bells toll to announce a Gothic revival, the wider recognition of Toria Wooff’s artistic talent. As it stands, despite repeatedly telling my friends not to sleep on this, it is alone that I make my way back to Manchester for the working week, a mist travelling across the black road as I cross the latent River Dee. Sometimes you can’t even bring a horse to water, let alone make it drink.

I write this review a week later in the dead of night, on the night the clocks go back for the coming winter. As I see the time change from 2 a.m. to 1 a.m., the above quote from Hamlet comes to mind. Thinking back on the lighted porch of St. Mary’s Church before doors, I remember reading once about a folk superstition from Tudor times. It was believed that if you kept a watch on the porch of your parish church throughout the night, you would begin to see the spirits of the living people of your parish entering its doors. Those who you did not see come out again would die before midsummer.

But beware this gift of augury, which came with a price: it was also said that if you failed in your vigil and fell asleep, you too would die. For the final song of her encore tonight, Toria Wooff plays ‘Estuaries’ softly, almost like a lullaby. But this is no time for sleep. Like the vigilant guards of Hamlet‘s opening scene, I have already borne witness to the event, and now await the next opportunity. Four times have I seen the Woman in Black live and had her song greet my ears. Others have too, and the number deserves to grow. Do not sleep on this any longer. Take a pew, and watch with us the minutes of this night.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)

The Bargain (unreleased)
Lefty’s Motel Room
Song for A
Sweet William
Black Shuck (unreleased)
Noiselessly (unreleased)
Aleister (unreleased)
The Waltz of Winter Hey
Mountains
Good Mother (unreleased)
The Flood
House on the Hill (unreleased)
That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
Encore: The Plough
Encore: See Things Through
Encore: Estuaries

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

The Billiad: From the Meth Den to Live at the Royal Albert Hall with Billy Strings

October 19, 2025 / Mike

Friday 10th October 2025

Royal Albert Hall, London, England

The day starts and ends with the sound of Billy. At six in the morning my dog wakes me up with barking and a flurry of face licks, thoughtfully determined that I shouldn’t miss my train down to London in… checks clock… three and a half hours. I groan and roll over. Billy huffs and lays down next to me.

I named the now two-year-old cavachon Billy because he came into our home as a puppy shortly after I last saw Billy Strings live, at the Manchester Academy in November 2023. Since that time the two Billys have been ever-present in my affections; one with pats and belly rubs and the other… without any of that, because that would be weird. I will forever associate the Billy Strings song ‘Enough to Leave’ with my Billy, because it was the song I played to soothe the pup to sleep on his first night with us in his new home.

As for the other Billy, he’s grown even more remarkably than the puppy has. When I first saw Billy Strings at the Manchester Academy two years ago, he was already a star, playing intensely liberating music to a crowd of adoring thousands. Largely embraced by both the traditional bluegrass scene and by the more progressive crowd, he plays and records music that can’t help but strike a chord with people. Alongside his own albums, he has collaborated with legends like Willie Nelson and, more recently, Ringo Starr, and it’s not too hard to imagine that his own name will be spoken about as a legend in the years to come. When the taxi driver arrives to take me from my home to the train station in Manchester (don’t worry, my Billy is not left alone), he asks me why I’m heading for London. I say I’m going to see Billy Strings at the Royal Albert Hall, and just as I’m about to explain who he is and what bluegrass is, I find there’s no need. The taxi driver is already a fan.

But for all his talent and all the success he’s enjoyed over the last few years, even Billy Strings must have struggled to ever imagine himself headlining at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve attended some impressive venues over the years, from cavernous arenas to intimate churches to charming, dimly-lit back-rooms, but this is the first time I’ve attended one of the world’s truly special, iconic venues. The Royal Albert Hall is a vast, opulent colosseum, an exquisite piece of imperial architecture that in its every detail and coalescence reflects the power and prestige of the Victorian era in which it was built.

My eyes struggle to take in the vastness of the dome, which is peppered with large purple-lit acoustic discs drooping from the ceiling, and I find myself thinking that the deadheads in the pit tonight would no doubt be amused to learn that the Royal Albert Hall can only achieve its sound with the help of these mushrooms sprouting from the ceiling. I look to the Royal Box where monarchs since Queen Victoria have sat, before my eyes return to the stage where even greater names can be found: Sinatra, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. Wagner, Verdi and Elgar. A speech by Winston Churchill; a bout by Muhammad Ali. Perhaps most remarkably, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the same bill in 1963. Behind the stage, the vast organ pipes of the Voice of Jupiter lie dormant, and I turn to look back up at the dome, recalling John Lennon’s lyric from ‘A Day in the Life’. “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire… Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” The line is even more of a trip when you’re there and you try to imagine filling the room with holes yourself.

The Beatles song ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ plays over the tannoy as I take my seat in the stalls, following on from the end of a Paul McCartney song I couldn’t quite catch. Later on there’s the Tom Petty song ‘Hard on Me’ – he also played at the Royal Albert Hall. I adore Tom Petty, placing him second only to the Beatles, and I reflect on how, in some ways, I see Billy Strings as the man’s successor. While their sound is different, their approach is not. Like Petty, Billy has that knack of making you feel like everything will be alright. Perhaps it’s just the natural overflow of witnessing someone who seems like a genuinely good person create art to a high level on their own terms, and having people respond to it. That’s creative expression at its peak, in integrity, behaviour and ambition, and it soaks into the notes of their music.

And like Petty, Billy Strings came from a difficult background, a hard life that would have sunk most people unseen and unheard, and he rose above it to become truly, generously remarkable. Shortly before the concert, Billy posts a photograph of his childhood home on Instagram, followed by another of tonight’s prestigious venue during soundcheck. “From the meth den to the Royal Albert Hall,” he writes.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Billy Strings (@billystrings)

Everyone knows how special this night is, then, even before it begins and Billy remarks on it from the stage, looking around the hall and taking it all in. This, of course, is where the Last Night of the Proms is played; they know how to shoot music here and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the hope and glory of Billy’s own set released on film at some point. Everyone here knows this will be a moment, a milestone, in Billy’s growing legend. A night when it will be, in the decades to come, a genuinely awesome flex to be able to say: I was there.

Because to match the specialness of the historic venue, Billy and his band provide a set for the ages. I’ve previously described a Billy Strings set as a moveable feast, but this was the feast of all feasts, a 10 out of 10 show on 10/10/2025. A one-off UK date (this is not part of any national tour) was always likely to result in a spectacular set-list, but Billy and the band really pull out all the stops here. Even Jerry Jeff Walker would want to be in London tonight, not home with the armadillo.

Some concert mainstays get definitive takes; some lesser-played and never-before-played songs are not only aired but billow like sails filled by a trade wind. Those long, frenzied bluegrass jams that catch and release, which are like a moreish drug… well, there’s not just the usual one or two songs for that tonight but three or four at least. The crowd is fantastic too; we’re locked in, deathly silent when Billy sings a cappella in the darkness and roaring like a storm when we know the band is pushing it higher and higher and yet somehow keeping it together. And then there’s the release, the break, like crashing waves. The Royal Albert Hall gets it all. Four thousand holes might fill the Albert Hall, but there’s not a single hole to be found tonight.

You might ask, then, whether there’s even any need for a review or commentary from myself. Billy Strings certainly needs no introduction, not when the mere sight of him walking onto stage tonight generates a roar among the thousands present that most bands could not raise with their finest song. And unlike some of the smaller, special gigs I’ve been to over the years, there’s no high-minded compulsion to blog and diarize this concert for posterity. It’s recorded, as every Billy Strings gig is, on Nugs.net and perhaps also in the film cameras that zero in on the man on stage tonight.

But even a recording of the highest fidelity cannot capture the atmosphere in a room, or properly convey which songs garner the most emotion in a performer and in an audience. Because silence and song has a weight as well as a resonance, and the weight can only be felt in the moment, in person, as it crushes and lifts and ripples through a crowd.

This review, then, is the weighing of the night as I remember experiencing it from the hall, after Billy Strings walks out onto the stage and looks around and laughs in disbelief. His eyes take in those of us in the stalls and loggia before wandering up undaunted to the gallery and the Rausing Circle. “Well, howdy!” he says.

The first song, ‘Red Daisy’, is a fine stage-setter for the night, a fast bluegrass number right out of the blocks that not only introduces us to Billy’s sometimes-underappreciated singing voice and one of his distinctive fast-pickin’ acoustic guitar solos, but also to the four members of his band. Billy harmonises with his namesake Billy Failing on banjo. Jarrod Walker, who wrote the song, provides some fine mandolin, trading solos with the fiddle of Alex Hargreaves. The Hall’s namesake Royal Masat holds it all together with his large upright bass.

The band show they mean business with their second song, an imperial ‘Gild the Lily’ worthy of this storied hall. Introduced by Royal’s bass, which remains prominent throughout, the band feel themselves into the set with this song, a keening if conservative fiddle solo from Alex bringing cheers. Billy allows himself a long, dreamy guitar solo, switching into a psychedelic electric sound via the pedalboard at his feet and drawing the night’s first primal roars from the crowd. “I’d sing along with the birds, if I only knew the words,” Billy sings, his long hair blowing in the artificial wind. It’s the first transcendent moment in a night that will prove to be full of them.

The band move into the next song without stopping, ‘Hellbender’ played as conventional bluegrass with the band passing off the music to one another to play their solos. They trade with one another in a similar way in the follow-up, the fan favourite ‘Dust in a Baggie’, which Billy introduces as being probably his own favourite song of those he’s written. As the band play, Billy dances before turning to play directly to the fans standing in the balconies of the choir behind the stage.

The night is special for other reasons too. The crowd spontaneously sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a bashful Billy Failing after ‘Hellbender’; he’s 36 years old, “the birthday boy tonight,” as Billy Strings says, laughing. There can surely be few better ways to spend your birthday than as part of the headline act at the Royal Albert Hall, and Billy Strings agrees. “You’re the present,” he says to the cheering crowd. “You’re IN the present, man,” he adds, cosmically. After ‘Dust’, Billy Failing leans in to speak with him while he’s tuning his guitar. “It’s your birthday,” Billy replies playfully. “I’m not gonna screw it up.”

Speaking of births, Billy tells us that he’s a dad now, and that the first record he played for his son when he took him home was Doc Watson’s Portrait, an album he “commandeered from my dad’s own collection” and which he loves. “It was so warm… Jerry Douglas’ big ole warm dobro slidin’ on there, it’s just beautiful.” Now he plays ‘Leaving London’ from that album for those of us in London tonight, “not quite as good as that, but the best we can”. The song’s played straight, a nice cut of bluegrass with the band providing some great old-timey harmonies on the line “I’d fly to my own true love again.” For all their musical prowess, the band are also capable of bringing out goosebumps with their harmony vocals.

Those harmonies return on the following song, ‘Show Me the Door’ creating ripples of excitement as soon as Billy sings its opening line, “She ebbs and flows like water.” A long, thoughtful guitar solo from Billy wanders around the storied Hall before falling into one of Jarrod’s mandolin flourishes. Jarrod’s solo takes over; the song by this point having become increasingly gentle, the crowd in the pit bobbing, ebbing and flowing like water in the cool turquoise stagelight.

It’s followed by a sprawling ‘Dawg’s Rag’, starting with a fast mandolin riff immediately and keenly picked up by Alex Hargreaves’ fiddle. The two instruments repeatedly pass off to one another as the song builds, with Billy Failing’s banjo also getting in on the action. For a time it becomes almost a soft and pensive song, more silk than dawg’s rag and the moment when Alex really kicks into top gear for the night, the classically-trained violinist beginning to relish playing in this historic venue. His fiddle draws cheers, the crowd appreciating how the five men on stage each pull the song in their own directions before coming back together again. The song seems to be ending with some slightly foreboding chords, before it picks up again and Alex bursts into a prime, spirited fiddle straight out of the free-breathing hills.

For the next song there’s a change of pace, as Billy hands off his guitar to a roadie and switches to a double-necked Martin Grand guitar. His phrasing sounds uncannily like the spaced-out psychedelia of John Lennon as he sings the opening lines of ‘Stratosphere Blues’. The song glides into ‘I Believe in You’, the vocal phrasing and the construction of the song now reminding me more of Tom Petty. The performance of the two united songs has been delivered primarily by Billy, with the band’s light touches only becoming more prominent as the song progresses.

Billy switches back to his normal guitar, thanking us for being here. “I truly cannot even believe that I’m standing here right now, saying this,” he says, with genuine awe in his voice. “This feels like a special night here with these fellas, on Bilbo’s birthday and with all of you.”

To end their first set, the band effortlessly deliver a crystal ‘In the Clear’, before Billy walks to the front of the stage and plays the opening bars of ‘Turmoil & Tinfoil’. It’s an epic, generational rendition of the song, the concert mainstay building and building as the band trade lines – a proper, vintage B.M.F.S. concert jam. The jam spreads around the room as Billy and Alex build each other up higher, the crowd roaring when they recognise the precarious peaks they are daring each other to scale. But they don’t fall apart; the jam sticks, with Billy Failing’s banjo joining in and taking a prominent role. Billy Strings’ own acoustic solo morphs into an electric one by way of the pedal, and he strolls to the front of the stage again while playing, sending the pit wild. The solo becomes thrillingly electric as he stalks about the stage and shreds heavily, before returning to the band and introducing some wah-wah from the pedal. The ghost of Jimi Hendrix sits up, his ears burning, and the Voice of Jupiter nods mute approval. Billy announces they’re taking a short break, and the crowd roars their exit from the stage.

When they return after the intermission, Billy and the band pick up where they left off. ‘The Fire on My Tongue’ is played conventionally, with fine harmonies and the trading of solos across the five men on stage. The song ebbs to catch its breath, before Billy tear into a longer, fast-pickin’ solo. Billy is dancing, the crowd bouncing now too as though they’d never been away. The song builds and builds, Billy letting out a long “Welllll” that draws cheers and crashes straight into ‘Ole Slew Foot’. The ‘Foot’ is fast and fun, with Billy stalking to the front of the stage. He starts singing from a microphone which has been strategically placed there, his ole left foot resting on a speaker.

After the familiar return, Alex’s fiddle now starts off a cover of the Jim Croce song ‘Age’, something Billy says he’s been “fixin’ to do”. It sounds like classic country, a wonderful moment as Billy Failing and Jarrod Walker harmonise with him. It’s the first time they’ve ever played the song live, and it doesn’t deserve to be the last. They follow it with ‘My Alice’, the song from the latest Highway Prayers album drawing cheers of recognition from the crowd from the very first notes. It’s a moment for the band to let us breathe – and we’ve needed to catch our breath, because next up is ‘Away from the Mire’, its distinctive opening riff causing frissons of excitement through the Hall.

People know what’s coming; like ‘Gild the Lily’ and ‘Turmoil & Tinfoil’, ‘Away from the Mire’ is one of those songs that Billy and the band can expand and contract at will into memorable, profound jams, a song that even if you’d never heard it before you would know it’s building to something epic. Mandolin and fiddle solos give us a taste of what’s to come, before the song retreats into a dreamy instrumental soundscape, as though summoning the energy it knows it will need. A long solo from Billy becomes a wailing electric with the use of the pedalboard, a sort of gentle frenzy. A possessed Billy moves to the front of the stage, closer to my side, during his epic, almost unbelievable solo. We can’t help but cheer its conclusion. In such a moment you marvel at the journey this band is capable of taking you on within a single song, let alone how they help you glide along that journey so effortlessly. Listening to a ten-minute Billy Strings jam live is as undemanding as a two-minute pop song, and more rewarding by orders of magnitude. It’s one of the night’s best performances.

It’s followed by another, though one in complete contrast to what we’ve just heard. The four members of Billy’s band leave the stage and Billy unslings his guitar. He approaches a microphone that has now been placed for him at the front and centre of the stage. He looks around, taking in the cheers and the applause.

“This is such a beautiful room,” he says. “I want to sing a song here without the guitars barking.” What follows is astonishing: a solo, a cappella delivery of the mournful hymn ‘And Am I Born to Die?’ The crowd are instantly, respectfully silent, and you could hear a pin drop as a single spotlight descends on Billy. Only a few months removed from the death of his mother, one of the heaviest and most profound losses a man can bear, Billy sings of a “trembling spirit fly Into a world unknown. A land of deepest shade, unpierced by human thought.”

I don’t know if this loss is what he holds in his mind as he sings the hymn. But it’s clear he digs deep to sing it. It’s note-perfect and deeply resonant. It’s brave; the young man singing alone and without instrument under the spotlight in the silent, darkened colosseum on a milestone night in his career. None of the classical giants who have graced this hall since its Victorian genesis could have delivered it better, and if Billy’s guitar abilities often overshadow his vocal talent, his singing can never again be knowingly undersold by me or anyone else who hears ‘Born to Die’ in the Royal Albert Hall tonight. This is what I meant when I wrote earlier in my review that silence and song carries a weight, indescribable and only fully understood in the moment. When the song ends and the lights come back up, the silent crowd begins to roar with pent-up release. It’s a moment of music I think will stay with me until I die.

No doubt feeling the need for release himself, Billy straps his acoustic guitar back on and – still playing solo – sings a fun, routine version of ‘Brown’s Ferry Blues’. “Hello there,” he says as he starts to play the song, perhaps recognising that we are all different people meeting again on the other side of ‘Born to Die’.

He replaces his guitar with a banjo, and Billy Failing walks out to join him with his own. The banjo strings of Strings succeed in teasing Failing with an impromptu playing of ‘Happy Birthday’, before the two decide to play ‘Dos Banjos’. The crowd begin to clap and stomp their feet as Dos Billys play, cheering as Billy teases Failing further, stalking in a circle around his friend as they play.

Taking a big swig of his drink, Billy slings his guitar back on and the rest of the band come back out. Billy introduces them all by name, garnering applause, and the five reunited musicians break into ‘Escanaba’. The instrumental’s a good reintroduction to what they’re all capable of, with solos from Jarrod’s mandolin and even from Royal’s upright bass. The bass provides some regal backing to a long fiddle solo from Alex, drawing more worthy cheers from the crowd.

It’s followed by a fine, swaying cover of ‘Nights in White Satin’, the Moody Blues hit fitting Billy and the band like a glove. Billy’s fast guitar then hoists ‘Pretty Daughter’ high, the man stalking to the front of the stage as he plays before returning to the rank of five to harmonise energetically on the chorus. A mandolin solo from Jarrod draws cheers, and Billy dances as he sings. An incredible fiddle solo from Alex sees the crowd roaring as it catches fire, and even Billy can’t resist letting out a yell and dancing with delight. The crowd is delirious, and Billy takes another big swig of his drink.

“I don’t even… I don’t know how to thank y’all for coming out tonight,” he says. “But this has been such a magical evening that I will always remember.”

As a thank you to his English audience, he alters the opening lyrics of his next song, a cover of Leon Payne’s ‘Psycho’, to “Can Mary fry some fish – and chips?” The song is knowingly disturbing – “you think I’m psycho, don’t you, mama?” goes the harmonised refrain – and ends with a foreboding sound that reminds me of the rising orchestra in the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, the song whose holes could fill this Hall.

But just as that song’s orchestral build broke into Paul McCartney’s upbeat middle-eight (“woke up, got out of bed”), tonight’s ‘Psycho’ reveals ‘Hide and Seek’, the fourth and final of those great majestic jams Billy and the band deliver to us live tonight. Those distinctive notes kick the band into gear and the crowd erupts. “Well, it’s a dark time, I do believe,” the band harmonise.

‘Hide and Seek’ builds and pauses and then builds again, the band in complete control of the music. Their ebbs and flows crash against the crowd like waves, making even the most reluctant body in the Hall move in a St. Vitus dance. The song builds again as Billy steps out to the front and the crowd roars. Even the stagelights get in on the action, composing a frantic lightshow as Billy shifts again into an epic electric solo and the music continues to build. As the solo and the song ends, Billy yells – a cathartic release.

It feels like a finale, and the band stop to take in the extended applause and cheers at the end of the marathon song. And while there’ll be no encore tonight – the band play right up until curfew – it feels like we’re at that moment. The band have peaked and everything that happens from now is a bonus, a de facto encore.

Billy and the band, sans Alex, gather around a single mike that a roadie places at the front of the stage. Billy plays a harmonica note to help get the four of them in tune, before they begin to sing ‘Richard Petty’ a cappella. In contrast to ‘And Am I Born to Die?’ earlier, the crowd cannot contain their delight, roaring and stomping their feet and clapping. It seems to throw the band off – ‘Richard Petty’ is a difficult harmonic feat – and they struggle to stay in key. To their credit, the audience recognises this and tones it down, the stomps fading to a minority. ‘Richard Petty’ is able to “carry on without the strife” and it becomes a perfectly fine rendition, if not the transcendent experience the song has proved capable of being.

Billy and the band put their instruments back on, with Alex and his fiddle now joining them at the single mike. ‘Tennessee’, their final song, is a straight cut of bluegrass, with harmonies on the chorus and Royal Masat thrilling the crowd by coming in deep with “I hear her calling me.” The Royal Albert Hall is treated to a final flurry of solos from guitar and mandolin and fiddle, before the band’s harmonies end the night.

“Thank you, folks!” Billy says, handing off his guitar to a roadie. He stands alone, the man from the childhood meth den now taking in the roaring applause of London’s Royal Albert Hall. His band join him and, arm in arm, they soak it all in and take a theatrical bow before exiting the stage.

Jimi Hendrix’s song ‘Fire’ plays over the tannoy as they leave. We’ve certainly been privileged to stand next to their fire tonight. As the crowd filters out, I stay seated for a little while longer in the stalls of the Royal Albert Hall. I look over at the balconies, up at the dome, back to the now-emptying stage. Someone once sat in this seat in 1963 and watched the Beatles from this same distance. They watched legends being made. And as I look I can almost manifest their four silhouettes on the stage close by, imagining how real they must have once been stood right there.

Tonight I can say without hyperbole that I’ve watched another legend in the making. No one can hit the matchless heights of the Beatles. It is impossible. But having witnessed Billy Strings live with his band, playing brilliant, imaginative bluegrass music to a crowd of thousands, and learning something of the journey that brought him here, I can say that his is also a story that you can scarcely believe is being written, and tonight was an illustrious chapter in it. If I ever have grandchildren, I might well find myself bragging that I was there when Billy Strings played the Royal Albert Hall. And I will be able to draw on this review I have written, a week removed from the event, to recall some of its intangible weight from the mists of time and memory. That silence in ‘Born to Die’ is one of the most exquisite sounds I’ve ever heard.

Stepping out into the night, I walk around the outside of this beautifully composed piece of architecture, taking it in from all sides. Finally satisfied, I walk back to the road and stand on Kensington Gore, looking across to the Gardens at the opulence of the Albert Memorial. At a taxi rank that’s comically small for a venue of this grandeur, I finally manage to hail a passing taxi.

A man behind me is also waiting for a taxi, and I ask him where he’s going. “Euston Station,” he says. That’s also where I’m going – my hotel is close by – so I invite him to join me. In the ride that follows it turns out that, remarkably, he came down to London for the concert today from Kearsley, only a few minutes up the A666 from where I began my own journey this morning in Salford. From my taxi driver this morning, things have come cosmically full-circle. But then perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise. Billy Strings fans are everywhere, and we’re growing in number. The man’s just that good. Dogs find themselves named after him. From Manchester to London, from meth dens to the Royal Albert Hall, everybody loves Billy – and rightfully so.

Setlist:

(no opening act; two full Billy sets with intermission after ‘Turmoil & Tinfoil’)

Red Daisy (Jarrod Walker/Christian Ward) (from Renewal)
Gild the Lily (William Apostol/Walker) (from Highway Prayers)
Hellbender (Apostol/Aaron Allen/Jon Weisberger) (from Renewal)
Dust in a Baggie (Apostol) (from Billy Strings EP)
Leaving London (Tom Paxton) (unreleased)
Show Me the Door (Walker/Ward) (from Renewal)
Dawg’s Rag (David Grisman) (unreleased)
Stratosphere Blues/I Believe in You (Apostol) (from Highway Prayers)
In the Clear (Apostol/Allen/Weisberger) (from Highway Prayers)
Turmoil & Tinfoil (Apostol) (from Turmoil & Tinfoil) [End of Set #1]
The Fire on My Tongue (Apostol/Allen/Weisberger) (from Renewal)
Ole Slew Foot (James Webb) (unreleased)
Age (Jim Croce/Ingrid Croce) (unreleased)
My Alice (Apostol/Allen/Weisberger) (from Highway Prayers)
Away from the Mire (Apostol/Weisberger) (from Home)
And Am I Born to Die? (Charles Wesley) (unreleased)
Brown’s Ferry Blues (Alton Delmore/Rabon Delmore) (from Earl Jam)
Dos Banjos (Apostol) (from Billy Strings EP)
Escanaba (Apostol) (from Highway Prayers)
Nights in White Satin (Justin Hayward) (unreleased)
Pretty Daughter (Danny Barnes) (unreleased)
Psycho (Leon Payne) (unreleased)
Hide and Seek (Apostol/Walker/Billy Failing/Royal Masat) (from Renewal)
Richard Petty (Apostol) (from Highway Prayers)
Tennessee (Jimmy Martin/Doyle Neikirk) (unreleased)

Note: An official stream of tonight’s show is available on Nugs.net here.

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

Humbucker Blues: 49 Winchester Live in Manchester

October 13, 2025 / Mike

Wednesday 8th October 2025

Manchester Academy, Manchester, England

humbucker – ˈhəmˌbəkər

noun – a coiled device attached to the body of an electric guitar, beneath the strings, to cancel out electrical interference and unwanted noise

There’s nothing quite like seeing a great rock band in their prime, live on the stage. The power and synergy of a band of men picking on guitars, booming on drums, singing and harmonising and shredding their way through an amplified set. Men who have spent so much time together, on stage and in practice and on tour buses, that they can almost read one another’s minds, and who show it in the confident, inspired interplay of their music.

49 Winchester are the epitome of this. A band of six men from Virginia who first started practicing on the small-town street which gave them their name. A band who, years later, are on stage tonight at the Manchester Academy as one of the two great Southern rock bands of this generation (the Red Clay Strays being the other). Amidst a flurry of blinding stagelights they burst straight into the funky twang of ‘Long Hard Life’, following it up with a frenetic version of ‘The Wind’ that dazzles even more than the lightshow does. Justin Louthian’s drums boom. Chase Chafin’s bass roams. Noah Patrick’s keening steel guitar slides across the bars and Tim Hall, the ‘Redneck Mozart’, fills in the gaps with his keys. Bus Shelton’s electric guitar trades licks with the one slung around Isaac Gibson’s neck. Gibson himself, the hillbilly hegemon, provides vocal dynamite, moving from the country shitkicking of ‘Long Hard Life’ through the raucous rocking of ‘The Wind’ into the soulful tones of ‘Everlasting Lover’.

It’s a blistering start to the night, the first three songs a testament to what a rock band can do when given their head. One hundred years ago it wouldn’t even have been possible, with the electric guitar being an invention that came out of experiments in electrical amplification in the 1920s and 1930s. To provide aural fidelity, the instrument required some innovations, not least the humble humbucker. Attached to every electric guitar you will find one of these modest coiled pickups, or something similar, which cancel out electrical buzz and “buck the hum”, allowing for the exquisite tones of amplified guitar music. This eventually birthed rock ‘n’ roll and the sound which 49 Winchester now put to great effect on ‘Miles to Go’, their fourth song of the evening.

It’s a shame, however, that all the innovation and ingenuity which made rock music possible could not find a way to tune out the one perennial blight on the live music experience: the obnoxious fan, born with no shame or self-awareness and with a foghorn instead of a mouth, who ruins the experience for everyone around him.

Tonight’s unbalancer of the signal-to-noise ratio is a burly, moon-faced man who plonks himself directly behind me, stage-right – despite this being a spot on the periphery of the Academy hall that I’d chosen largely in the hope of avoiding such people. I’m no miser, no hillbilly bah humbug, and I certainly don’t expect people to just stand silently and clap politely on their night out. I’m all for roars and singalongs and dancing, which can help make a night of music special, especially music like this which encourages a bit of rowdiness, like seasoning added to a soup.

But every reasonable concert-goer knows the type of person I’m now describing. In the annals of concert fucknuggetry, he demands his own page. He starts 49’s set excitedly telling his girlfriend about his new purchase from the merchandise stand – a black hat – and he’s desperate to prove worthy of its polyester peak by demonstrating to everyone around him that he is 49 Winchester’s biggest fan.

He does this by singing along – which is every fan’s right, of course, even if the only thing this particular lost soul can harmonise with is a bleating goat. The problem is that he doesn’t know any of the lyrics for any of the songs, and so after Isaac Gibson sings a line from the stage, our stage-right simpleton loudly repeats it – two bars behind.

Growing bored of this, and with his IQ struggling to match the room temperature, he stumbles upon a brainwave. Instead of singing the lyrics, he decides to substitute them with his own. “I shit my pants. I SHIT MY PANTS!” he brays, over and over again, before turning to his companion. “This will be so funny tomorrow!” he yells.

In this way, the first half of 49 Winchester’s set is disrupted for me and probably two dozen other paying fans who have waited sixteen months for 49 to return to Manchester. It’s not only an insult to us, but an insult to the band, who Isaac Gibson confesses are as “sick as a dog”, just as he is, and yet who power through their illness to make it an amazing night for their fans. Only to have one burdensome oik ruin it for many of those fans anyway.

You may ask at this point why I don’t say something, waiting until now in this review to be a tough guy from behind a keyboard. One reason is that I have in the past argued at concerts with aggressive, ignorant people who go too far, and reflected afterwards that it probably hadn’t been a good idea to do so when the guys were younger than me, intoxicated, and probably could have beat the shit out of me if things had gone south. Call me coward or call me sensible, but I have no desire tonight to risk an altercation with this regeneration of Sloth from The Goonies.

Another reason is that I can still hear enough of the music to make it salvageable. I’ve been able to enjoy ‘Anchor’, delivered slow and soulful by the band under moody blue lights, reflecting later that one of the best things about live music is that it helps you appreciate songs from a band’s catalogue you might previously have overlooked.

That said, some of my favourite 49 Winchester songs are spoiled by Sloth, including ‘Yearnin’ for You’, ‘It’s a Shame’ and ‘Russell County Line’. The latter sees British country singer Jake O’Neill invited onto stage to sing with Isaac on 49’s signature song – but it passes me by. When Isaac announces he is inviting someone onto the stage, Sloth shouts “It’s me!” and then rants indignantly throughout the song when this proves not to be the case. Had the band not recognised the poetic genius of his “shit my pants” lyric?

The final reason I don’t say anything is that, mercifully, this mooing buffalo starts to migrate through the crowd, benevolently spreading his talent to as many people as possible. I should be sympathetic for those now afflicted, but in truth I’m just relieved he’s gone. At the end of the night, as the band tell the crowd we’re all going to take a selfie together, this prime specimen of humanity can be seen climbing a railing, nudging a young woman aside to do so, determined not to deny 49’s photo finish of its main character. But for those of us in his wake, the hum has now been bucked, and from ‘Annabel’ onwards we’re actually able to enjoy the music unmolested.

If half a set seems like insufficient lemonade to make from the sour lemon Sloth has left us, we’ve at least already been recompensed by tonight’s opening act. Wyatt Flores sings from behind an acoustic guitar and a huge grin, backed by Austin Yankunas on another acoustic and a rather eccentric Clem Braden, who wears what looks like a green pith helmet and alternates between mandolin, keys and some rather thrilling blues harp. The trio perform their own 12-strong set of material, combining original songs like ‘Welcome to the Plains’ and the hook-laden ‘Milwaukee’ with crowd-pleasing covers like ‘How to Save a Life’ and the Turnpike favourite ‘Kansas City Southern’. Their penultimate song is a sprawling, expansive ‘Oh Susannah’, worth the admission fee alone and providing a more-than-worthy curtain-raiser for tonight’s main event.

In 49 Winchester’s set, the clear harmonies in ‘Annabel’ are, with Sloth now gone, more blissful than ever. I’m now able to appreciate not only the band but the rest of the crowd who, with the one now-well-documented exception, give 49 the energy they’re looking for. ‘Hillbilly Daydream’ is a solid rocker elevated by the buzz of the crowd and the power of the band. “Not quite boiling, but hot enough to scald,” as Isaac sings, but the night does then reach boiling point with the stop-start thump of ‘Don’t Speak’ and the raucous crowd-pleaser ‘Tulsa’. Isaac salutes someone in the front row, and the night is good.

The freshly humbucked aural clarity on my side of the room is something I’m particularly grateful for as we enter the home stretch. Aside from being a supremely tight rock band able to roam through the various genres of roots music at will, 49 Winchester also have, in frontman Isaac Gibson, an excellent songwriter and soulful singer. This is now proved further in the performances of ‘Damn Darlin” and ‘Hays, Kansas’. The latter in particular brings forth goosebumps; the song – which Isaac tells us was one of the first he ever wrote, when he was 19 – remains his crowning glory. Its mix of soulful desperation, wandering despair and cathartic angst, driven by an increasingly epic rock momentum, is 49 at their absolute best – difficult as that is to distinguish when they set the bar so high at the start of the night.

After an obligatory ‘Last Call’ to end their set, 49 are roared back onto stage for an encore. They deliver an intense, crunching rendition of ‘Hillbilly Happy’, the band’s illness seemingly banished by adrenaline if Isaac’s signature high kick is anything to go by. And they have enough juice left over for Isaac to hold up his hand and say they’re going to do one more. “We’re going to do something we’ve never done before and play something that isn’t one of our own songs.”

“This is for Ozzy,” he says, before leading the band into a tribute to the late, great Ozzy Osbourne with an immaculate, soulful cover of the Black Sabbath ballad ‘Changes’. It’s another moment that causes goosebumps, a soulmate to the earlier ‘Hays, Kansas’ and a shining example of 49 Winchester’s taste, power and dexterity. It’s so exquisite it stirs me to wonder momentarily why the band don’t do more covers. But then the stage fades to black and a single spotlight remains on Isaac Gibson, the hillbilly hegemon, as he stuns a molten crowd with his final soulful verse. With a singer and songwriter this talented, leading such a band, you can only stand back and let them go where they will in their own good time.

Setlist:

(all songs written by Isaac Gibson, unless noted)

Long Hard Life (from III)
The Wind (from The Wind)
Everlasting Lover (from III)
Miles to Go (single)
Anchor (from Leavin’ This Holler)
All Over Again (unreleased)
Yearnin’ for You (Gibson/Matt Koziol) (from Leavin’ This Holler)
It’s a Shame (from III)
Bringing Home the Bacon (unreleased)
Pardon Me (unreleased)
Russell County Line (from Fortune Favors the Bold)
Annabel (from Fortune Favors the Bold)
Hillbilly Daydream (from Fortune Favors the Bold)
Don’t Speak (from The Wind)
Tulsa (Gibson/Stewart Myers) (from Leavin’ This Holler)
Damn Darlin’ (from Fortune Favors the Bold)
Hays, Kansas (from III)
Last Call (from Fortune Favors the Bold)
Encore: Hillbilly Happy (from Leavin’ This Holler)
Encore: Changes (Geezer Butler/Tony Iommi/Ozzy Osbourne/Bill Ward) (unreleased)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

The Woman in Black: Toria Wooff Live with the Manchester Camerata

October 9, 2025 / Mike

Sunday 5th October 2025

Derby Hall, The Met, Bury, England

“It’s not often you get to see one of your favourite artists backed by an orchestra,” opener Carl North says from the stage tonight. “And for free, too.”

With this one utterance Carl makes my own review redundant, because this is the appeal of the night in a nutshell. Toria Wooff has become one of my favourite artists in the half-year since I first came across her music and heard her play in a packed basement in Manchester, delivering an evocative Gothic folk sound with sophisticated songwriting and powerfully clear vocals. And tonight she’s not only backed by four members of the Manchester Camerata as a string quartet, but it’s free entry too – part of the Camerata’s charity-driven celebration of music across the ten boroughs of Greater Manchester.

Tonight is the third time I’ve seen Toria live in the six months since I first discovered her music, with a fourth soon to come as she embarks upon an autumn tour in the next couple of weeks. That fourth will make her joint-top of the list of artists I’ve seen live (with Kassi Valazza). Having written reviews of her Manchester and Liverpool gigs in so short a span of time, is there anything new I could say a third time around? Would it be best, perhaps, to just leave the night with Carl’s succinct summary?

In one sense, no – I can’t say anything new. Toria is as good as ever – strong in voice, picking out melodies on her acoustic guitar, and after the show devoting her time to those who wish to meet and speak with her. But in another sense, the presence of the Manchester Camerata on this unique night gives me a new perspective, an opportunity to reflect on the talent and achievements of this artist.

Not all songs would stand up to the scrutiny of a classical rearrangement, but Toria’s do, which speaks to the quality of her songwriting. The bones are strong, and in the capable hands of Polly Virr, one of Toria’s regular collaborators, who has reworked their arrangement for the camerata tonight, they remain as impressive as ever. Toria’s self-titled debut album is played in full tonight, and in the same sequential order. The balance, the flow of the music, is excellent, giving us an opportunity to doff our cap to James Wyatt, Toria’s partner who produced that exquisite album at Sloe Flower Studios.

One thing that’s clear is that Toria has chosen her collaborators well, not only Polly and James but Carl North, her friend who opens the night with his own acoustic guitar and deeply soulful voice. His original songs, including ‘Hard Times’, ‘Thorn in Your Side’ and ‘Pearl’, are able to stand tall alongside his covers of Hank Williams, Jerry Reed and, as the last song in his set, the Bob Dylan song ‘Corrina, Corrina’.

And, of course, there are the members of the Camerata itself, one of whom (Katie Foster) played on Toria’s album too. Tonight’s string quartet consists of Sarah Whittingham, Katie Foster, Alex Mitchell and Graham Morris (the latter on cello) and, with Polly Virr watching on from the audience, they bring an orchestral magnificence to Toria’s songs, whether that’s the pensive roaming of ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’, the thoughtful rumination in ‘Sweet William’, the dreaminess of ‘Mountains’ or the soaring catharsis of ‘See Things Through’. They bring out the haunting depth of ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ and conjure a sound like rustling autumn leaves on ‘Estuaries’. Falling glissandos from the cello add an element of danger to ‘The Flood’, the swelling music drawing deep smiles from the quartet. There are few better harmonies of sight and sound than an orchestra swaying as they move across their strings.

The smiles are even warmer on their faces at the end of the show, as Toria leaves the stage and they remain seated, looking in her direction as the audience cheers for an encore.

“I genuinely didn’t have anything prepared,” Toria says after she returns to the stage in her long black dress and lifts the strap of her acoustic guitar back onto her shoulder. She decides to treat us to a new song, telling us she’s finished writing her second album and it’s currently in tracking. The song was written while she was reading the Gothic horror novel The Woman in Black, and “this song is loosely attached to that”.

‘House on the Hill’ is the song in question, and if tonight has been an impressive recreation of her first album, ‘House on the Hill’ shows that Toria’s second is to be eagerly anticipated. You can hear a pin drop as her clear voice fills the hall with one of those memorable folk melodies she has proven to be so good at creating. The song is played solo by Toria on her guitar: an unprepared encore, no arrangement from Polly, the four members of the Camerata now just four more additions to an admiring audience of hundreds at the Derby Hall. It’s not the free entry that appeals. It’s not the orchestra that keeps us fixed in place, remarkable as they are. The draw remains the woman in black, Toria herself.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Toria Wooff and written by Toria Wooff, unless noted)

The Plough
Lefty’s Motel Room
Song for A
Sweet William
Mountains
The Flood
Author Song
The Waltz of Winter Hey
That’s What Falling in Love Will Do
See Things Through
Estuaries
Encore: House on the Hill (unreleased)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.

Tag: concert review (Page 1 of 5)

Ghost Story: Toria Wooff’s Somewhat Gothic Christmas Live in Manchester

The Warmth of Oblivion: Edith Pageaud Live in Manchester

A Cuckoo in the Nest: Listening to Sierra Ferrell Live in Manchester

Journey Into the Childerswald: Tyler Childers Live in London

Our Cup Runneth Over: The Red Clay Strays Live in Birmingham

In the Court of the King of Instruments: Roger Sayer Performs Interstellar Live at Blackburn Cathedral

Watch With Us the Minutes of This Night: Toria Wooff Live in Chester

The Billiad: From the Meth Den to Live at the Royal Albert Hall with Billy Strings

Humbucker Blues: 49 Winchester Live in Manchester

The Woman in Black: Toria Wooff Live with the Manchester Camerata

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