Andy Shepherd

We had a great evening in Soho at the Pizza Express Jazz Club last night. I took Tamdin to see Andy Shepherd who was playing the first of a four-night stint with a backing band that had John Parricelli on guitar, Dudley Phillips (bass) and Nic France (drums). There was also a guest vocal appearance from Liane Carroll who also played the piano as well and she was good, very good. A big girl who belted out the vocals but with a fine voice and plenty of personality who was decked out in what appeared to me to be some kind of sailor suit, although I am almost certainly wrong about as I am quite useless at accurately describing such things but there you go. I had booked our table well over a month ago and the early booking paid dividends as we were right in front of the small stage, as close as it was possible to get to the performers. We arrived fairly early as well which meant that we were able to order and eat before the performance began which is a lot better than still having to be stuffing your face right in front of people who are playing a show.

It really is great to be able to take the tube into town and walk into a place like the Jazz Club for a night’s entertainment. The group were on fire last night, Andy Shepherd was fantastic (it was the fourth time I had seen him there, always with different backing musicians although Big John on the axe has more or less been a constant) and just halfway through the first number it clicked in a way that I knew made sure it was going to be a special show and I was not wrong. Tamdin really enjoyed it as well, she thought Andy was fabulous, both by way of his demeanour and playing; this was important as I very much wanted her to have a good time. The last time I had taken her to a show was back in 2003 when we went up to Birmingham to see Bob Dylan play at the NEC. For a number of reasons the evening had very nearly been a disaster and I catalogued the whole debacle quite extensively in the Three Bob Shows series of essays that form one of the latter sections of Justifying the Star: Writings Around Bob Dylan 2000 – 2004. Anyway there was nothing like the repeat of the trauma of Bob in Birmingham and in many ways the evening went far better than I ever could have hoped.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it, the Jazz Club was sold out and the dreadlocked waiter who served us told me the remaining three nights were full as well. Kicker. I hope that when Andy next plays a series of shows there we will be able to go down and catch one of them. Brilliant. Next week of course I do have a couple of Bob shows to make my way to, first in Cardiff on Tuesday 27th and then the night after in Bournemouth. Hopefully they will not contain any notorious incidents and will leave me with feelings of positive anticipation for the release of Modern Times at the end of August.