Get Out More…………………………..Gig Review

SOPHIE ELLIS BEXTOR (Filini, Birmingham)

26-07-2007

Bit of a curiosity this one…one of Britain's biggest pop stars playing a handful of songs for an invitation-only audience of around 250 people in the restaurant of the Radisson SAS Hotel.

Most of the folks present were Heart FM competition winners, and as befits a radio station whose target audience is women aged 25-40 there were - yes - lots of women aged 25-40; the ideal audience for Ellis Bextor’s soft soul shuffle.

Not, on the other hand, an obvious choice for The Stirrer's attention - but here's a shock confession.

Sophie Ellis Bextor is one of my official Guilty Pleasures - to the extent that I even splashed my own cash on her 2001 breakthrough album “Read My Lips.”

I mean - “If This Ain’t Love” (which she didn’t perform last night) and “Murder On the Dancefloor” (which she did) - what’s not to like.

Given the intimacy of the surroundings, she arrived with an appropriately scaled-down band - just keyboards, drums and acoustic guitar - and shorn of all the studio gloss her voice was strikingly pure, and rather more remarkable than on CD.

She bounced through her new single, paraded a couple of album tracks, smiled and chatted obligingly to her fans and rounded the whole thing off with a rocking rendition Lesley Gore’s camp classic “It’s My Party.”

It was all a long way from her days as an indie chick (she once fronted a band called theaudience and recorded a b-side with Manic Street Preachers) but from where I’m standing, a big improvement.