Duffy

Last night I went to the Phoenix Concert Hall for the first time in.... I'm not sure how many years. Let's just say it was so long ago that I had a VIP pass for their retro Saturday nights. Was it Saturday? Or was it Friday? Or were Fridays exclusively the Brunswick House? Or Colby's when the Brunny got a bit stale?

Anyways. Last night was an actual concert at the Phoenix, and the star of the night was this lovely Welsh girl named Duffy. Well, actually her name is Aimee Anne Duffy, so I am told. She's a pretty young thing with an incredible voice, and she came out onto the stage with no fanfare wearing a simple red and white number which she said she chose specifically for it's "Canadian colours". And then she sang.

Oh wow can she sing.

The crowd was standing room only, as is the case with that place, and everyone seemed to be loving it. Jamie and I were pretty close to the stage so we could see her very well, even if this maniac woman in front of us kept getting her Scary Spice hairdo in the way. and was it ever hot in there. All those people packed together so tight generated a lot of heat. I swear there was air conditioning when we walked in. I don't know where it went.

I've not done a lot of small venue gigs before; usually I save my concert money for big gigs like Madonna, just for the sheer scale of the productions, but on a value for money index you really can't go wrong for $37 for Duffy. She was fun, she wasn't full of herself, she was certainly interested in keeping the audience involved in her performance by talking to us between songs and ad-libbing the odd humourous quip.

Jamie got the logic for this one right; see these new artists when they are still affordable and while they are still producing. My Madonna tickets (3 of them) ran me $550 and although I am going to enjoy that show a lot, I know that my feeling of connection to the person on stage is going to be less because of the sheer number of people there and my distance from the stage. And also perhaps because of the rehearsed structured nature of Madonna's bigger "Stick and Sweet" tour vs Duffy's "hey come and hear me sing" kind of attitude.

Buy her album. Support her.

That is all.