Eddi Reader's Newbury gig had to be Perfect
Eddi Reader with support Jill Jackson, at Arlington Arts, on Friday, September 30. Review by BRIAN HARRINGTON
Jill Jackson is the perfect support act for Eddi Reader. She has toured with her previously and is an acclaimed and award-winning singer-songwrier in her own right.
From the moment she stepped on stage Jill built an instant rapport with the capacity audience with her often self-effacing, but always witty, repartee. Her latest album Yours Aye takes its title from the way her grandfather, a hypnotist and magician, ended his letters home during the Second World War. Aye, Jill explained, meaning always.
I particularly enjoyed the title track and the whimsical Are We Nearly There; a track recalling childhood holidays in Blackpool, when her father used to play a Buddy Holly cassette endlessly in the car. The same memories inspired her final song tonight a cover of It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.
Eddi Reader may be best known to many as the voice of Fairground Attraction, but she is so much more than that relatively brief period of fame might suggest. Her voice is phenomenal, powerful, soaring to marvellous highs while her stage presence and her storytelling captivates audiences and draws them in. She regaled the audience with stories of her childhood in Glasgow and the many family parties in which her relations used to sing popular songs to entertain one another.
She opened her 90-minute set with Hummingbird from her 1998 album Angels and Electricity before moving on to a jazz influenced rendition of Fools Rush In (a standard dating back to the mid-1930s and popularised by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, among others).
Naturally, the setlist included Perfect and Find My Love, along with a stunning version of the track Fairground Attraction, complete with an ending of Bravo Pour Le Clown, an Edith Piaf song full of anger and angst, Dragonflies and Follow My Tears were outstanding, as was Patience Of Angels, which she included by audience request.
In another nod to those family parties in Glasgow she finished with a cover of Moon River.
Absolutely brilliant.
