It's been a while since I featured any music on this blog. However, mention must go to a gig I went to a couple of weeks ago in Aberdare.
Opening the gig was the award-winning Scottish Gaelic singer, Julie Fowlis, who has previously featured on this blog. Rather frustratingly, the audience were still entering the theatre and talking amongst themselves as Fowlis started her set.
If there is a weakness at all in Fowlis' approach, it is in her presentation of songs - which could perhaps be a bit more snappy. Folk musicians of all traditions tend to be a bit hesitant / over-long in their intros. Nevertheless, this is splitting hairs. Fowlis' band had shut the audience up by the end of their first number, and they kept the audience captivated with their complex rythyms and harmonies to the end of the set.
I have been familiar with the music of Beth Neilsen Chapman through the Terry Wogan breakfast show on Radio 2. However, I had never brought any of her music up until now. We had stocked up on her latest CDs in the weeks before the gig.
Only a tin man would have failed to have been touched by the gig. Much of her output seems to be rooted in the event of her husband's death in 1994, and her subsequent approach to life and faith. Much of her latest album, Prism, is based on a world tour of spiritual-related music in the years after losing her husband.
Beth Neilsen Chapman probably comes closer than any other artist I have heard in terms of faith. Indeed, one song, "The Flame" , seems to be a ready-made anthem for Unitarians (whose universal symbol is the flaming chalice).
One of her songs about an old school friendship had someone in our row in tears. Those close to me will know that the theme of old friendships is something that fascinates me greatly to the extent that I tried writing about it in a creative writing class. It was then my turn to struggle against the waterworks as she dedicated a song for my late hero, Paul Walters, who had done much to promote Beth Nielsen Chapman's music on BBC Radio 2.
One problem with many gigs is the feeling of anti-climax when they are ended. On this occasion, however, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Julie Fowlis served up a veritable feast of music and emotion and it was probably for the best that the gig ended sometime before I had been divested of all emotional energy!
