Last night I went to see Beth Orton at the City Hall and really enjoyed the first half hour of her acoustic solo set. But like so many acoustic sets, it quickly became samey, boring and dull. It is a real job to capture an audience without an amplification unit to beat them into submission.
That's the challenge that Lisa Fitzgibbon set herself when she recorded her new album live @ The Bull's Head.
Lisa is accompanied by an astonishingly talented backing band; Jane Griffiths, Jon and Colin Fletcher. Her band are all Oxford residents and the link to Lisa who hails from Australia and probably explain why she is such a regular visitor to our humble little city.
Lisa and her band are yet another important reflection of Oxfordshire's fantastic folk scene. She calls it Power Folk, partly to shed the connotations of more traditional folk but also to represent the passion that infuses the music.
Don't expect folk rock, it's still gentle and in parts very beautiful.