This was the second informal concert Chris had staged from his living room in a couple of weeks. After the first gig I described him as jacket and tieless and tonight he shows up aiming for the Eustace Tilley award. With just one Red Admiral he may have made it.
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This time he shared the spotlight with singer Joanna Eden. They’ve been working together on and off for years and it shows. The formula was simple: find a few seasonal songs, sing and play the bejesus out of them and make the viewer feel as though he’s schmoozing down the pub with a few mates.
It was a just-right programme running the gamut from The Man With The Bag to The Christmas Song by way of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Christmas Time Is Here. Just by way of a change Chris weighed in with a couple of licks on guitar and Joanna played and sang a Christmas-type song she’d written herself. In case we weren’t sure it was really live the camera fell over a couple of times and the family’s two dogs wandered in and out to see fair play.
Despite Chris’s casual dress the first gig was much more formal; in the interim someone obviously murmured in his ear “It’s only a movie, Ingrid”, and the result was a much more relaxed evening though Chris could do worse than bung the electricity board a few bob – Joanna kept her coat on for most of the evening.
All in all it was a lovely evening and had they offered mulled wine and mince pies it would have been perfect.