Pete Courtney (with Rebecca Collins)

Cork Music Collective presents Pete Courtney (Rebecca Collins – support) Upstairs at The Roundy Thursday, 16th August, 9:30pm A quick note on Ms Collins – she is a little gem. A real song crafter and what a voice! Husky and soaring, singing songs of love, loss and temptation, I could see her making a killing in Nashville, making cowboys cry into their beers. And now to Mr Courtney. It is a pity that the gig wasn’t better attended. One, it’s always good to see a large appreciative audience, rather than a smaller one, and, two, because the smaller the audience, the more likely it is to be filled with friends & family. This does not really allow for an accurate gauging of the gig as this kind of crowd is going to be more pre-disposed to showing appreciation for what’s going on on-stage than an other audience. In addition, a small crowd of general well-wishers can result in a gig which is more of a cosy in-joke than anything else. It is to this that I am putting down the 3 minutes during which Mr Courtney stood on stage doing nothing more than tuning a hand-held radio in and out of stations. Maybe this is his thing and I missed the joke. Maybe. Overall, I found the sound to be too dense and layered. There was one moment where he left the stage and, sitting on a bar stool, did a cover of a John Martyn song and it was beautiful. Simple, clear, lovely. Then it was back to the stage and the layering and the noise over which his voice was sometimes hard to hear. I don’t think I got a good view of Mr Courtney – he has a good voice and certainly can play. Why was it then that I could not get the image out of my head of him playing to crowds outside Covent Garden as part of street theatre? The Nashville comment wasn’t a joke, by the way. Seriously! You’re young, pretty, have a good, good voice and can write one hell of a love song – Nashville Ho!