In the last gasp of the run-up to the festive season, this was a relaxed affair in front of a lively but friendly capacity crowd.
Texture is the alias of Scottish-based Bram E Gieben, and he gave us a bit of tunery and rapping as a warmup, including at least one track from album ‘Illvminate’, to be released in 2020.
Victoria McNulty’s spoken word pieces were both funny, cutting, embarrassing and moving in equal measure. She certainly has a way with words and held what could have been a noisy festive audience rapt with her charisma and verses – really good stuff.
Rebecca Wallace had a couple of technical gremlins with equipment but powered through, her amazing voice adding to the guitar loops and percussion to give us some warm and hilarious moments. She has a new album out in 2020, ‘Present Tense’, and BM for one is looking forward to it.
Rounding up the evening Darren McGarvey, aka Loki, gave us well over an hour of what could only be described as comedy, stories and repartee. He took questions from the audience (and there were quite a few, he admitted under scrutiny from BM that he sometimes opens Xmas presents before the 25th, the naughty boy!), gave us a few rap couplets and lines but in the main it was a self-deprecating dialogue with the audience, who were well up for it.
Although his recent successes were alluded to there was no preaching and not even much politics, just good-humoured banter. Quite a few in the audience have known him since way back so putting on any front or agenda was out of the question anyway. BM for one went off chortling into the night.