Wednesday 24 May 2017

LIVE: Luke Sital-Singh at Union Chapel (23/5/17)

I'm partial to a sad song or two, and last night's show with Luke Sital-Singh and support act Ciaran Lavery did not disappoint in that department. The show took place at London's stunning Union Chapel, a venue I've been desperate to catch a show in for a while, and the perfect setting for an evening of sad songs, with Luke touring his new record Time Is A Riddle. I caught Luke play a secret set at last year's Bushstock to a tiny audience in a wine bar so was pretty excited to see him perform to a much bigger crowd last night.

Luke Sital-Singh at Union Chapel
Listening to Ciaran Lavery's support set it struck me that the pairing was all kinds of clever - they have pretty similar voices (so anyone who is a fan of Luke should just about fall in love with Ciaran through the course of his set) and both have great banter and comic timing on stage, a sort of unintentional hilarity. Opening with a track where he played the guitar percussively and finishing up with a track without the guitar, his vocals carried beautifully around the venue and he had the audience in silence for the entire set, not easy for a support act to do! One of the highlights of his set was the track Shame, and there's a lovely session performance of that below...


Luke has deemed the tour the "magical misery tour" and I'm not going to disagree with that sentiment, but who doesn't love some sad acoustic songs? His second record Time Is A Riddle has been out for just under a fortnight and features the tracks Hunger and Killing Me, and the set took us right through many of the new album tracks alongside the biggest tracks of album one, including Nothing Stays The Same and Bottled Up Tight. A couple of tracks in to his set Luke asked the audience to clap and cheer louder after new tracks so that he'd get the sense that things were improving (again - the stage banter was great), but we hardly needed asking as each song was met with rapturous applause. With some people commenting that the venue has the best acoustics in London it was the perfect setting and I really felt like I was part of something special! Here's an acoustic performance (with some great reverb) of the new track Innocence performed for Bee Happy Sessions.


The tour carries on to Brighton tonight and Exeter on Friday evening before a handful of European shows, check all the shows and grab the record on his site here!

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