Foy Vance / Polar Bear

The Pigalle Club, owned by Vince Power, is a plush venue with stylish 1940s décor. The layout and dining arrangements are awkward though - the expensive tickets are seated at tables around the stage whilst the “cheap seats” stand in the thoroughfares between the bar and dining room. This is great if you want to eat and listen to cabaret but is not an ideal venue in which to see your favourite band, especially with the distracting to-ing and fro-ing of waiters and clinking of cutlery and plates. Having said that, both acts tonight manage to draw the whole audience in...

The support act is unusual - Steven Camden aka Polar Bear, from Birmingham who performs spoken word. He succeeds in capturing the audience's attention and entertaining us with his amusing rhyming prose and tales of being the black sheep of the family, his evocative memories of being a teenager and his student days.

The main act, Foy Vance, is a singer-songwriter from Bangor, who is relatively unknown in the UK, although that may change now that he has relocated to London and is about to record his debut album. The small loyal following that he does have obviously adore him. Foy also plays guitar and is accompanied by his wife, Joanne Vance, who lends beautiful backing vocals to many of the songs, and the accomplished Jools Maxwell on piano, keyboard, accordion and melodica.



It's difficult to categorise Foy - he crosses borders between soul, gospel and folk, and incorporates blues at some points during the performance. His voice is raw and expressive, and he puts his heart and soul into every song and performs with so much passion and energy that you believe every word he sings but fear he must be straining those vocal cords!

The songs are drawn from his two EPs - 'Live Sessions and the Birth of the Toilet Tour', and 'Watermelon Oranges', and he throws in a couple of new songs and covers. Foy manages to make Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' sound like a heart wrenching love song and puts soul into Radiohead's 'High and Dry'. He also covers Jimi Hendrix's 'Crosstown Traffic', which is clearly a favourite live.

The highlights of the set are many and include his excellent, heartfelt single 'Gabriel and the Vagabond' - a moving tale about homelessness with a spiritual tone to it – “She never was a fighter until he laid beside her and gently whispered hope”. He also plays the uplifting 'An Indiscriminate Act of Kindness', ‘Bailie's Blood’ which is a powerful song, especially when Foy stops strumming to accompany his vocals by thumping out the beat on the guitar.

Foy's awesome rendition of the Tom Waits’ song 'Come on Up to the House', as part of the encore, makes us feel as though we're part of a congregation in the American deep south as the crowd stamp and clap in time. We all raise a glass, as requested, to the as yet unborn new album. He goes into a studio in the Mourne mountains in northern Ireland from tomorrow to record it and hopefully it will be the start of a more widespread recognition for his impressive vocal and songwriting talents.

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.