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Acousticity Headgate Theatre Colchester September 21, 2002 www.netrhythms.co.uk				david hughes live review
David Hughes grins like a particularly capricious imp. His face creases & his eyes sparkle with the knowledge that he has the audience at Colchester's intimate AcoustiCity club exactly where he wants them. They've been softened up by his stunning acoustic guitar technique - tumbling arpeggios; rock solid, machine gun right hand picking - & his self-deprecating humour. The bespectacled, pinstripe suit clad Hughes now sits back in his chair & prepares to unleash a string of songs based around the Essex/Suffolk area from which almost all of the audience are drawn. His laconic introduction to Blue Car describes how all singer-songwriters are issued with a cause when they collect their guitar, "Sting got the rainforest.....I got rural transport". The audience are hooked, roaring with laughter. By the time Hughes moves to his battle of the sexes tango parody Hold your Horses Woman or the small town murder story Heart of Stone ("Management under new shop") they are completely captivated. Amongst the humour there are love songs, philosophical analysis of the attraction of a run down house just 50 yards from morning papers & the guitar shop and explorations of surreal dreams. This is the curiosity that is David Hughes - simultaneously sardonic, witty & musically complex with an ability to manipulate & hold an audience transfixed with just voice & guitar, communicating on some primal level borne of years of playing solo. Post show sales of the career retrospective CD Recognised are brisk then the audience, most of whom had never previously heard of David Hughes, disappear excitedly into the night to spread the word that real, organic music still exists in a world of plastic Kylies & boy bands. James Hibbins From the AcoustiCity website: This show was sold out before the doors had even opened and is it any surprise? Where do you start with David Hughes? Four albums, two books, a new 'Best Of' CD, 'David Hughes - Recognised' being released in time for this concert, as well as production commissions for the Design Council and BBC Radio Scotland make you wonder how this man fits in a hot meal. Luckily for us he lives a relatively short hop down the road in Maldon and provided the audience with a display of virtuoso guitar playing, erudite and witty songs, and the most hilarious stories and anecdotes in between. The Colchester audience warmed to him right away and were rewarded with one of the most entertaining hour's worth of music you could imagine. 'Blue Car' with its tale of the last days of David's old blue metro, enmeshed with a run down of the precarious nature of rural transport in East Anglia had the whole auditorium in stitches. We would like to thank David for supporting AcoustiCity. It is thanks to artists of his stature that the whole venture keeps going and we can introduce new songwriters to an audience with a very short list of venues in the area to visit. James Hibbins