NORTHUMBRIAN MUSIC
NIGHTS
What we said about
O'DB
Cool performance failed to
turn up the heat
It's a funny old game promoting music.
The fact is different people like different music, so ideally it's best to match the audience with the performer so that everybody ends up happy, but sometimes the formula just doesn't work out.
A promoter might book a band on the strength of the promotional CD and pages of glowing reviews, advertise the gig in all sincerity, and come the event the show reflects the preview in achingly beautiful detail.
Sometimes, however, the live version just doesn't manage to get across the divide to capture the hearts of the audience.
O'DB certainly enchanted their listeners on Friday night at the King's Head, Allendale, with really romantic renditions of Hold Me and I'll be your Mirror, that were brilliantly harmonised and superbly rendered by lead singers Lorna Bird and Moiread O'Donnell.
The songs were in fact cheerfully appreciated and the clarinet and saxophone instrumental backings, as well as the bass guitar riffs, were models of appositely placed chords and arpeggios. It was a little bit Sade, a little bit jazzy and all very professional.
During the Mary Coghland covers, Lou Reed, and a bit of Dougie Maclean the sound was pure and clean, sophisticated and cool, but perhaps that was the problem.
In general, audiences for Northumbrian Music Night promotions love hot and driving music that really engages and this time the temperature just didn't rise.
As a band member remarked after the show, it was the last of O'DB's current tour, and after wrestling with a recalcitrant van, perhaps it's understandable if that extra performance juice just wasn't there.
Even so, for some lovers quietly enjoying the ambience of soaring melodies and carefully matched voices, it was nevertheless a perfect, relaxed and enjoyable evening.
As someone once remarked, "Different people like different music" and in providing this sessino of different music at least the promoters and the band were as good as their word.
But the excitement of promoting after all has to be matched with integrity in review.
