Out of the Bedroom 675 review – Thursday 6th September 2018

Running order: James Igoe, Suzanne Dyson, Danny Emerson, Tina Louise Avery, Rosie Smith, feature act: Gareth Herron.

James Igoe

James opened the evening with two songs. The first ‘Inge’s Eyes’ was a sultry, slow burner of a love song which started the night off on an atmospheric tone. His second song ‘Braveheart Beggar’ was about forgotten people/races and invoked the spirit of William Wallace but also the retrospective view of ‘being less human than you’. A great start to the night.

Suzanne Dyson

Suzanne started her set by continuing the Scottish theme with a song in 3/4 time about the Scottish weather. How the seasons come and go every day! Summer in the afternoon; after a wet winter in the morning. Using some Scott’s phrasing from a friend – Mike – gave life to her second song, a love song to Edinburgh – as beautiful as nature itself. Rounding off Suzanne’s set was one of her Riot Girl songs ‘Let’s Hang Out’. This was a rare occasion to hear such a song played on a ukulele!

Danny Emerson

Danny opened his set with ‘No Time to Waste’ a Neil Youngish song with a positive guitar riff and a driving bridge. This ended with an almost ‘Greek’ feel to it. His second song was the ‘fake memoirs’ of ‘Billy the Kid’. A more gentle ballad about ‘being a bright one’. For his final song Danny turned to the house piano and said ‘I’ll play this…’ What started as a dense, dark and moody piece of piano playing about ‘facing your fears’, lightened in the second half, but still pleaded ‘Don’t turn from the coming storm’.

Tina Louise Avery

Tina’s first song was ‘Weave the Sea’. Delicate vocals over an arpeggio guitar. Extoling a ‘cloth of gold to cover us in’. Good song-writing. This was followed by ‘All the Ghosts’ – about ‘walking out on someone else’ with references to snow, sea and sand. Good memories become good song lyrics. Finally, Tina was back to her characteristic fingerpicking style in a song about her nephew – standing tall and firm – in ‘Memo to You’.

Rosie Smith

Opening her set with ‘Face in a Dream’, Rosie sang about ‘trying to forget, but the memories are still fresh’ and a ‘Broken girl in a broken bed’ very moving. Her second number was ‘Crossing the Line’ with a simple open strumming and repetitive lyrical forms such as ‘I look away, you look away…’ and the rhetorical question ‘What do I do now?’. Rosie’s final song is unnamed as yet but was in part about ‘falling in love with someone who lives in another country’. Nice simple rhyming: ‘Jump start a car, follow your own star’, told a meaningful story.

Gareth Herron

Gareth was our feature act and treated us to an albums worth of songs! This writer got to 11 of them before having to leave so the final number he played is unknown! Gareth’s songs were mainly of the self-reflective autobiographical kind and much about relationships. He uses strong strumming patterns which are lively, with the occasional fingerpicked song that galloped along. Lyrically, Gareth is very interesting where phases such as ‘Yesterday we were strangers, but today we are two’ and in ‘Masks’: ‘put on in their youth, in case they see the truth’ invoke strong images. The set list up to when I had to leave was:

• Castles in the Sky
• Strangers
• Believe
• The Abyss
• One More Night
• Some of the Memories
• Three hours to Boarding
• Masks
• Another Someone New
• Wishful Thinking
• My Next Life

Suzanne Dyson