Piers

On Friday P. and I saw Piers Faccini in concert. This was a major deal since we hardly ever go to see live music anymore. We used to be permanent fixtures at the now-defunct Cricketers — a Blues club on the Quai de Paludate in Bordeaux — but that was in those faraway days before the poison dwarves.

So Friday evening we got our glad rags on, wondering what young people wear nowadays. We needn't have worried, when we got to the venue we soon realised that the audience was about our age - old. They were mostly dressed like us too: bobos obviously.

The tickets said "formule club" but we weren't sure what this meant. It turned out that it meant standing in the foyer of the Rock School Barbey beside the bar but with no tables and — more alarmingly for the over-40s — no chairs.

Anyway, it was a great concert. You can't not warm to someone who walks out into a room full of strangers and sings the first number a cappella. I'm not a great music critic. (The student newspaper at university rejected my only contribution, a dithyrambic account of a Thin Lizzy concert that probably dwelt a little too much on the qualities of Phil Lynnot's leather-clad legs.) Piers Faccini probably has good legs too but it's his voice and gentle aura that hold your attention.

Judge for yourself.