So I’m back from touring Germany with Maggie Reilly and we’re straight into a run of our Aretha Franklin show at Hideaway in Streatham. This was one of our most popular shows last year and probably my favourite one to play.
We’re featuring Nina Ferro and Brendan Reilly and some great new arrangements of some classic Aretha tunes. Stella band too including Janette Mason on piano, Billy Adamson on guitar and Westley Joseph on drums as well as a two-piece horn section. It’s gonna be rather special…
If you missed the show last time, here’s a couple of little tasters of what you can expect. First up is Nina and Brendan singing I Knew You Were Waiting For Me)
And here’s Nina performing (You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman
You can book your tickets at the Hideaway website or over the phone on 020 8835 7070.
This blog entry is a little late in the day to be honest as these shows were a couple of weeks ago now, but I thought it was about time I dropped a little post about Nina Ferro’s new record Into The Light. And I’ve just been sent the first video from the show to share with you. Perfect timing!
Earlier this year, Nina flew out to Nashville for a month to work on a new record totally from scratch. She met up with fellow Aussie and Nashville resident Sam Hawksley and in the space of one month manages to write and record an entire album’s worth of material.
We were all very excited to hear the new record and the minute I got my copy I knew this was going to be right up my street. We played a show at the 606 not long after Nina’s return and previewed just a few of the new tracks but the official album launch took place at St. James Theatre at the beginning of this month. We had a great lineup including Sam Hawksley (who flew over for the launch), Tim Weller, Grant Windsor and Niamh Mcnally on backing vocals. Over two nights we presented the album in it’s entirety alongside some other original tunes from some of Nina’s back catalogue. The shows went down a storm. Here’s a link to Sebastian Scotney’s review of the first night’s show from the London Jazz Blog.
Nina just sent me this video of us playing Cry Cry Cry at the launch gig. This is the first YouTube video I’ve seen from the shows so it’s a bit of an exclusive!
Nina will be launching the album over in Melbourne on February 1st so if you are reading this from the other side of the planet you haven’t missed your chance! Watch this space for announcements of forthcoming live shows here in the UK. If you haven’t seen Nina Ferro live yet you’re frankly missing out and you’re going to want to get yourself along to a show at the next opportunity! We’ve been lucky enough to have Nina feature on a few shows at Hideaway this year (you can check out some videos from the Aretha Franklin set here). I suspect we’ll be playing the Into The Light set there sometime in the near future too.
Thought I’d drop a quick post to share a few videos that have emerged from the rather excellent Hideaway YouTube channel.
After the success of our Bond shows a couple of months ago we recently put on a brand new show dedicated to the music of Aretha Franklin. We featured the awesome Nina Ferro and Brendan Reilly (of Basement Jaxx). Here’s Nina singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman…
And here’s Nina and Brendan performing the classic duet I Knew You Were Waiting For Me…
Last weekend was the premiere of our new Disco Divas show with Nina Ferro and Annabel Williams featuring the music of Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston and Gloria Gaynor. Here’s Nina and Annabel performing Cheryl Lynn’s Got To Be Real. If you’re only gonna watch one of these three videos, watch this one!
This month we’ve got the David Bowie show with David McAlmont and Sam Obernik (13-15th June) and our Ella Fitzgerald/Sarah Vaughan nights (27-29th June) featuring Nicola Emmanuelle and Juliet Roberts. All these shows have been put together and arranged by our illustrious leader Janette Mason. Get yourselves some tickets folks…