Sometimes you get the feeling that you aren’t actually at a concert venue like the Hug and Pint and you are, in fact, in somebody’s living room. I don’t mean like the time you fell over a fence into a garden, walked through some (closed) French doors in to a perfect stranger’s living room, tripped over a cat, saw some flashing blue lights, got tasered and learned one of the great truths of life – no matter what they say in the adverts, there is nothing on the supermarket shelves that will ever get those trackie bottoms clean again. It's an intimacy thing really.
Anyway, I digress for words must be written on tonight’s entrée, Emily Scott. Who is Emily Scott? Well, she likes aubergines, ice cream and cheese and, tonight, she even had two thirds of the Fell Down trio to assist her in the deployment of a set of subtle and elegant neo classical songs that easily satisfied the appetite of those who have the good taste to appreciate such quality things.
If the meal metaphor is to continue then Louis Abbott should most rightly be considered the dessert. He had the demeanour and appearance of the sensitive singer songwriter type and, like that second helping of chocolate pudding, easily achieved the objective of sending you off into sweet slumbers.
The main course, Gabriel Kahane, was, however, a preparation of gourmet standards. Any musician that can make his very virtuosity seem casual and can, concurrently, take seemingly trivial subjects and give them, through his songs, a scope that verges on the cinematic will readily bring joy to the ears of the connoisseur and, like the justifiably appreciative audience tonight, there was no other logical option for me other than to join together in admiration of an artist of genuine talent.
Thus satisfied, even the near mandatory midnight snack became superfluous. That, believe me, does not happen often.