KRYSTAL WARREN FACTORY THEATRE 23 September, 2012 Drum Media
Wes Carr started with a short, tight set including some new and more established tunes, a couple of shameless plugs for his new EP and an endearing manner all-round. Not terribly diverse or groundbreaking, but certainly solid and complete with a one man mini-set (you don’t get many support acts that bring more stage gear than the headliner, so kudos there if nothing else).
Not long later Krystle Warren gave us a wave on her way through to backstage to get ready, a warm but timid gesture that was apparently genuine relative nerves for the night’s performance. When she took the stage there was no such nerves to be heard, however, and it was only her insistence that she was uneasy, coupled with apparently tetchy sound and an eventual string breaking, which showed even the smallest chink in her armour. However, if this was Warren on a bad day, then bring on her grand final performance.
Starting with You Can Take Me With You and Five Minutes Late from her latest release Love Songs, throughout the set she used this album as a launching pad to show her incredible vocals. Although here it was in original acoustic mode, as opposed to the self-described “full Phil Spector” of the recording, this was simply proof that a good tune doesn’t need much to launch it. In between we also got “a new tune I’ve been noodling with”, a cover of Bob Dylan’s It Ain’t Me, Babe that absolutely soared with Warren’s masterful – and here relatively sedate – treatment, as well as The Clod And The Pebble, one of the Love Songs she shamelessly used poet William Blake as a lyricist for. Also breathtaking was her older tune Circles, which she claimed had been informed by a Jools Holland interview, “my favourite Shakespeare story,Much Ado About Nothing” and a bit of Jeff Buckley.
By now, despite the need to borrow a new guitar, to walk away from a monitor with bad sound and having toppled her own chair over, once this mountain was scaled Warren seemed to just relax and finally go with it. The simple and gorgeous I Worry Less absolutely soared, as didTuesday Morning. In the pre-encore wind down, she asked the audience to look under their seats to find a ‘pressie’ (which ended up being a hilarious and quite gorgeous ‘spontaneous Q and A session’ that ended in an album and further tour plug) and to finish we had an all in singalong to the lyrics “Forget Me Not” in three (enthusiastic, amateur) parts. Dear Krystle Warren, don’t ever be nervous coming back to see us – you had us at hello.
Written by Liz Giuffre