Being a fan of foreign pop music has led me into some rather strange situations over the years. I’ve watched Melody Club with only 4 other people, been to a Russian Winter Festival to see Dima Bilan, and now I’ve sat among Brighton’s poshest middle-aged music fans at a Kathryn Williams concert in order to catch Marit Bergman live, after many years of patient waiting.
I’ve been to a few sitting-down concerts (Rufus, Darren etc.) but never before one with tables set out like a restaurant. Since I failed in persuading any of my student chums that they wanted to pay £15 to watch a singer they’d never heard of play for 25 minutes, I went on my own, and felt like quite the outcast among all the groups of 40 or 50-somethings having a nice meal out with wine and live music. This was also the first time I’ve got back from a night-time concert by 9pm, having escaped as soon as Marit left the stage.
It was hard to tell what the audience thought of Marit, as they were of course very polite, and I don’t know enough about Kathryn Williams to gage how receptive they’d be to someone like Marit. Her voice is certainly not classically trained, but it’s beautiful in its quirky Swedish way, and suits all of her songs perfectly. If you’ve listened to Marit’s lyrics you’ll know how witty and cool she is, and this showed through in her little speeches between songs, so I was glad to get to see her in England and be able to understand everything.
She sang 3 songs I knew well (Mama I Remember You Now, No Party and I Will Always Be Your Soldier) and 3 that were new to me, including one she’d never sung live before, inspired by a journey to Aberdeen, and one she wrote for Kylie but “silly Kylie didn’t want it”! She introduced said song by claiming that Kylie made her think of two things, gays and sex, so the song was about gay sex, although from having heard the song I think she was probably joking as there was nothing I spotted which was an obvious allusion to such acts. It was actually a beautiful song, and would have surely been a better first single for Miss Minogue’s last album than Two Hearts. I think an album needs to be made of songs Kylie’s turned down, because from hearing this and Ready For The Floor I can only imagine how great the rest must be!