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.
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.
